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Introduction
The New York Times published this story today, showing what happens in the free wheeling State capitalist society now in progress in China.

Amid China's Boom, No Helping Hand for Young Qingming

By JOSEPH KAHN and JIM YARDLEY

Published: August 1, 2004

UJIA, China ⋅ His dying debt was $80. Had he been among China's urban elite, Zheng Qingming would have spent more on a trendy cellphone. But he was one of the hundreds of millions of peasants far removed from the country's new wealth. His public high school tuition alone consumed most of his family's income for a year.

He wanted to attend college. But to do so meant taking the annual college entrance examination. On the humid morning of June 4, three days before the exam, Qingming's teacher repeated a common refrain: he had to pay his last $80 in fees or he would not be allowed to take the test. Qingming stood before his classmates, his shame overtaken by anger.

"I do not have the money," he said slowly, according to several teachers who described the events that morning. But his teacher ⋅ and the system ⋅ would not budge.

A few hours later, Qingming, 18 years old, stepped in front of an approaching locomotive. The train, like China's roaring economy, was an express.

If his gruesome death was shocking, the life of this peasant boy in the rolling hills of northern Sichuan Province is repeated a millionfold across the Chinese countryside. Peasants like Qingming were once the core constituency of the Communist Party. Now, they are being left behind in the money-centered, cutthroat society that has replaced socialist China.

With this article, NYT shows the chart "Two Chinas:" depicting growing income differences between rural and urban Chinese. The chart suggests that rural income is not growing as fast as urban income, especially during the last decade. Whereas urban income was 3 times greater than rural income in 1995, now it is about 4 times greater.

What the NYT article doesn't show is a comparison to the situation in the United States. This is difficult to do because of the very different economic structures and population distributions in the two countries. However, the Census Bureau's chart (shown below) displays the poverty rate in America for more than 40 years. What the chart shows is that the poverty rate decreased sharply during the Kennedy-Johnson Administrations, and stayed down until Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980. Thereafter, poverty increased during the Reagan-Bush Administrations, and decreased during the Clinton Administration. Since George W Bush was selected President in 2000, poverty is again on the rise.

What correlates is pro-capitalist policies and increased poverty, both in China and America. When you care more about money than people's lives, this is what you get.

China's Third World Economics

Amid China's Boom, No Helping Hand for Young Qingming