The obituaries that marked Deng Xiaoping's death on February 19, 1999 were extremely outspoken in their praise of the economic reforms he had unleashed on China. However, while getting rich has been glorious for many Chinese, a much larger number, although enjoying some of the reform's benefits live a less capital existence.We must start back a few years for a proper analysis. On June 4, 1989, there was a massacre that took place in Tinanmen Square in Beijing. It was a military suppression of students and others of a democracy movement. This happened under the Deng regime. Many foreign observers were in agreement that dire economic consequences would most likely result from this political folly. It was seen as though the Communist Party's "hard-liners" had triumphed and consequently any market reforms would end. Measures already implemented to control inflation combined with the brutal killings were probably going to send China into a deep and prolonged recession. Something strange happened though. Market reforms, far from being abandoned, were instead deepened. From 1991 to 1994, China's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) increased even more rapidly than it had in the frantic 1980s when China led the world in annual average growth. This continuing economic boom brought familiar social consequences. While average living standards continued to rise gradually through the mid-1990s, the rewards of economic progress were distributed in an increasingly unequal fashion. The gap between rich and poor, growing since the decade prior, became more and more visible in the 1990s. There are no official figures on the number of newly rich. Some estimates have said that there may be as many as 10 million millionaires or so in China. This number is so substantial when you think about how the People's Republic is the world's most rapidly growing market for luxury goods. The significance of these numbers may be interpreted in various ways, b...
