Towards a Reconstitution of Class Power?

On 9 June 2004 a certain Mr Wang purchased a $900,000 Maybech

ultra-luxury sedan from Daimler Chrysler in Beijing. The market

in luxury cars of this sort is, apparently, quite brisk. The inference

is that ‘a few Chinese families have accumulated extraordinary

wealth’.

45

 Further down the car status-ranking, China is now the

somewhere and somehow, is getting very rich.

Though China may have one of the world’s fastest-growing

economies it has also become one of its most unequal societies

(Figure 5.2). The bene

fits of growth ‘have been bestowed mainly

on urban residents and government and party o

fficials. In the past

five years, the income divide between the urban rich and the rural

poor has widened so sharply that some studies now compare

China’s social cleavage unfavourably with Africa’s poorest

nations.’

46

 Social inequality was never eradicated in the revolution-

fferentiation between town and country was even

written into law. But with reform, writes Wang, ‘this structural