Rich and Poor

Sitting here supping my coffee in my new favourite starbucks, I began to do a wee bit of people watching. Now, this area has a lot of Taiwanese and Koreans living in it so maybe, just maybe, the customers who frequent the place are not all from the PRC. Nevertheless, I sense that most of them are; it's not the clothes they are wearing, no it's not that, because they are all very trendily dressed, it's not even the proxemics, no it is not that, because their concept of personal space is almost shared by the Koreans and Taiwanese, so what is it? Well, they really do have this incredible inability to queue and then one guy has nothing better to do than shout into his mobile when I am sitting next to him; Alright that might be similar in Taiwan and Korea, so it is their inabiltiy to queue that is the give-away! Yes, most of the customers in my new, favourite, starbucks are from the PRC.
They are all sitting there supping their US$3 mugs of 'frappuccino' and this is a picture that is repeated throughout China and I have seen it in Qingdao, Beijing, Shanghai, Suzhou, Xi'an, Sanya, Guangzhou, Guillin and, yes, even Lhasa; well dressed Chinese, sitting there, supping expensive drinks and there are a lot of them and they make you think, "what a big, big, big country this is" and these are the privileged 100 million or so, who drive their cars, who get a university education, who are on the gravy train and out you go onto the street and you will see the others, working on building sites, troddling towards the factories, cleaning the streets, standing in front of your compound, serving you your meal, and these are only a few of the millions who have made it from the countryside and you know that where they came from there are millions and millions more and sometimes, just sometimes, when you look at them, your heart goes out to them and you think, "when is the wealth redistribution going to start?" Of course, in your heart of hearts, you also know that it isn't going to start and you think about 'Animal Farm' and "all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others."