A Boom financed by taxes on the poor

That is the second salient feature of today's China: the increasing influence of neoliberalism in policy-making. This doctrine dictates that to catch up, China has to go through a primitive process of capital accumulation similar to the process of British industrialisation. Profits have to be made at somebody's cost. And the somebodies, in this case, are the rural poor, shedding sweat to develop modern China.