We hear a lot these days about the fabulous growth of China, booming, bustling, shipping products to the world and building up a huge trade imbalance with the US. We see images of skyscrapers, factories, stock exchanges, restaurants, theaters, a vital middle class. We are told that they are beating us as our own game of manufacture and trade so we have to work harder, take wage cuts, etc. They are hosting the Olympics in 2008 and Beijing is getting a face lift for the occasion. We are warned that they are building their military machine and will be challenging our status as the only superpower soon.

What is not being so loudly trumpeted in the media is the downside of the Chinese Miracle. 17 out of the 20 most polluted cities in the world are in China. They are building coal fired power plants at the rate of two a week and the pollutions sometimes reaches all the way to our West Coast. Hundreds of thousands of people are dying each year because of pollution.

For every Chinese rising to the middle class there are tens of thousands still mired in poverty. In one recent year, millions of people took part in 80,000 protests, many of which turned violent. Money which should have gone to villagers in the countryside for rice is being diverted by the provincial governors for development projects, many of which drive the peasants off the land. People are being enslaved in the countryside to work in the mines. Corruption is rampant in the government and the people are well aware of it.

The infanticide of female babies because of the one child per family law has led to an imbalance in the birth rates of male and female children resulting in tens of thousands of poor men who have no hope of a wife and family. The teeming millions working the factories have little to no protection from job hazards, abuse, and exploitation.

The air pollution in Beijing is terrible and even shutting down manufacture and most transportation in Beijing for the Olympics may not do much to reduce it. One million peasants have been brought in to clean up Beijing for the Olympics and their working conditions are terrible.

The recent earthquake that devastated China brought demonstrations by distraught parents bitter about the substandard building practices that had contributed to the deaths of many children. And many of the dams that are damaged and threatening to burst were built over objections that they were sited in a seismically active area. The government is under heavy and much deserved criticism for these failures to protect the welfare of the people.

Mao came to power because he promised the peasants that they would have enough to eat and would be treated fairly. The current rulers of China could care less about ideology and they have broken Mao’s pledge to the peasants. China is going to have to pay some very heavy dues before they because a stable and prosperous society.