Louis Proyect wrote:
If any confirmation of the correctness of Marty Hart-Landsberg and Paul Burkett's "China and Socialism" (a book-length article in the July-August 2004 Monthly Review) was needed, you can look at the heartrending Aug. 1, 2004 NY Times article on the suicide of Zheng Qingming. This 18 year old peasant youth threw himself into the path of an onrushing locomotive because he lacked the $80 in fees to continue with college. It is the first in a series of NY Times articles dealing with class divisions in China, a country in which 85 million people earn less than $75 per year.
I had Elizabeth Economy, a China expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, on my radio show yesterday - I'll be posting the audio later today. It was surprising to hear this bourgeois scholar express alarm about massive inequality, growing protests, and ruinous pollution. Surprisingly, she also argued that the Chinese educational system isn't really developing the skills of the workforce, making it hard for the country to "move up the value chain," as they say around McKinsey. Doug