I have lived in Beijing for years and I think this is the most ruthlessly capitalistic place I have ever been to in my life. The gap between the rich and the poor is far more pronounced than it is in the West.

Just a few hours ago I walked past an extremely wealthy school owned by a corporation in Abu Dhabi that gives very expensive and high quality education for the richer Chinese who control the government. Along the same street, a little further down, there is a line of poor people in dusty clothes surrounded by police officers, and the poor people are waiting for interviews. What is the interview for? Because in their home provinces some corrupt official or police have done something wrong to them that they are seeking justice for.

In May when I was walking the same area I talked to two of them, a man and a woman, who told me that there son was murdered at his high school in Hunan, and the police covered it up and insisted that it was suicide. The father was working at a factory in Guangdong in the coastal regions when he got the telephone about his son's death, and immediately went back home. When they tried to go to the school, the surveillance camera footage for the time of the murder was all deleted from the school records and the school told them that it was a technical problem. When the father went to the police to complain, they locked him up in jail for ten days and tried to make the point to him that it was a 'suicide' and he should understand. Some of the other students had taken photos with their cellphones in which their son was lying face up with his hands neatly folded on his chest, lying on the pavement and no blood present (the police claimed he jumped out of the window from the top of the school, meaning that he somehow landed like this). The police went to the school and ordered all the students to hand in their cellphones for inspection, and photos were deleted. They have no idea who killed their son, but it seems like someone wealthy or powerful was involved and they had to come all the way to Beijing to make the official complaint but no one listened to their petition. When I met them in May the mother was still crying and they were holding up the picture of their son; they said they had spent such hard work over 18 years to raise up their boy and give him a good start in life, and this was the final result.

And people go in the line to this interview centre everyday, hundreds of them, most of them poor people from other provinces... and just down the street the sons and daughters of judges, military officers, party officials, businessmen attend education at a higher level than the common people, with foreign teachers and english classes, and maybe 30% of them graduate and go on to study at American colleges or other western countries.

Just a month ago, a friend of mine told me that in her hometown in Shanxi, when she was a child there was a gold mine there which employed workers on annual contracts. The miners were paid very little and the owners were wealthy. When they were going to complete the mining and take out the last bit of ore, the owners had promised the workers that if they made it to this day then they would be given a big bonus and their full wages at the final completion. When the final work came, all the workers went down to the bottom of the mine to do the final haul, and the owners at the top locked the doors and turned off the elevator that went to the surface, leaving them all down there to die. They paid the police and the police told the public that there was not enough evidence to mount a case against them, and so the owners went back to their offices in Beijing or Shanghai with the money in their briefcases.

This stuff is happening all over China, you know...all the time, even now... I think both TFP and the person who makes this video are under a really huge misunderstanding.

China today is not a communist or socialist country in any way other than name- it does not reject the idea of class difference or private ownership in any practical way; you can do anything here if you have money. China's own constitution, laws and regulations are often totally meaningless in practice -they often only exist on paper- China will enforce them only when it wants to, and corruption will often allow those who have money to pass through the law without trouble.

If anyone were to start protesting in China about these things or to seek justice, to try to get China's own laws enforced against the people with money in high places who are breaking them, they would be called a traitor, someone who is against their country, and other nonsense like this.

Pray for China