On China

Is it possible(or fruitful?) to try to fit China's economic and social reality into a Western framework? This article asks a lot of good questions.

Are we subconsciously shutting out something that we do not comprehend, or something we do not want to see because it doesn’t fit into our neat, Western economic concepts?

A few funny and sad facts:

...[o]f the 3,220 Chinese citizens with a personal wealth of 100 million yuan ($13 million) or more, 2, 932 are children of high-level cadres. Of the key positions in the five industrial sectors—finance, foreign trade, land development, large-scale engineering and securities—85% to 90% are held by children of high-level cadres.

In a Shanghai institution of tertiary education, typing “Jiang Zemin” into a search engine from a computer located on campus, three times in a row, leads to the automatic shutdown of access to that search engine for the whole campus.