During this mind-bending development boom, China has managed to rebuild scores of major cities and endow them with new airports, tunnels, and other key infrastructure projects, and to connect them by a rapidly expanding and truly impressive new network of freeways and railroad lines.

This tectonic development has created a climate of rising expectations, in which tens of millions of Chinese now can imagine they have a chance to move into the country’s expanding middle class. In the process of this high-speed development and opening to the outside world, China has edged its population closer to finally casting off its old identity of an abused, defenseless, and humiliated people from a backward nation. Indeed, China is today on the cusp of becoming a “great power.” Everywhere one can feel a new sense of pride and confidence, sometimes even arrogance.

Turn the crystal of the Chinese miracle only slightly, and you get a very different, and far darker, refraction of light.

Consider the following:
• Despite all of its economic progress, China continues to have a repressive Leninist state/party structure that affords its people only limited freedom of expression.
• Rule of law remains weak.
• Maoist ideology, although significantly lapsed, has yet to be officially repudiated.
• The Party has never made amends for its responsibility in such man-made disasters as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, during each of which tens of millions were persecuted, tormented, and dispossessed.
• Party leaders have yet to “reevaluate” the official verdict on the Tiananmen Square massacre, much less apologize for it. The People’s Liberation Army killed and wounded hundreds of unarmed civilians in an action first labeled “a counter-revolutionary rebellion,” then “turmoil” fomented by “hostile forces.”
• The press and the Internet, although invigorated by marketization, remain heavily censored.
• Tens of millions have found themselves laid off, or “sidelined,” from state enterprises, with little prospect of ever being retrained for the private sector. (Despite all the prosperity, some estimates place China’s national unemployment rate as high as 24 percent.)
• Just to maintain the status quo, China must produce almost 25 million new jobs each year.
• While the rise of China’s new middle class has undeniably helped create a sense of economic optimism, it has also helped create an ever-widening gap between rich and poor. In Shanghai, for instance, adjusted per-capita income is around $15,000, while in poor rural areas it has remained just over $1,200.
• The breakup of the old systems of state-owned industry and communized agriculture has left the welfare safety net in tatters and deprived hundreds of millions of peasants and workers of even minimal retirement or health benefits.
• Poverty in the inland countryside, which garners only 16 percent of China’s FDI, has led some 150 million peasants, known as the “floating population,” to seek jobs in cities like Beijing, Shanghai, and Canton, where they now make up a third of the population. They represent the largest migration in human history. The floating population has provided a crucial pool of low-cost labor but is also a worrisome potential source of future social instability: Should China’s economy take a downturn, migrant workers can no longer return to their villages and expect to find enough work to support themselves.
• In 2004, security officials recorded some 74,000 instances of significant social unrest. That number then rose ominously in 2005, to 87,000. In the countryside, the major causes have been excessive taxes, arbitrary fees, and indiscriminate tithes and land confiscations by unscrupulous officials.

The growing economic inequities, manifested so clearly in Mark Leong’s photos, have led to an ever starker contrast between rich and poor, and a concomitant rise in the number of violent clashes between ordinary people and armed police. Some top leaders, like Premier Wen Jiabao, have become deeply concerned, even to the point of canceling all national taxes on peasants’ harvest and income. But as China has grown wealthier in aggregate, the gap between rich and poor has also continued to grow, reaching a point where it has begun to remind many older Chinese of exactly the kinds of intractable socioeconomic fault lines that once helped fuel Mao’s socialist revolution.

Exacerbating these social tensions is a rising tide of official corruption. Because the state still controls most property and assets, and because officials are usually poorly paid, the temptation to profit from bribes and kickbacks is enormous. So serious has this trend become that the well-known economist Hu Angang has estimated that during the ’90s, losses from corruption cost China upwards of 17 percent of GDP. The absence of a viable legal system, coupled with the Party’s unwillingness to lose control of the anticorruption process, has led the Party to call upon its own extralegal Discipline and Inspection Commission to launch thousands of investigations and even to jail and execute some offenders. The strategy, as the traditional Chinese saying goes, is to “kill the chicken to scare the monkey.”

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