"Some Chinese people are rich, but China as a whole is unbelievably short on many of the things that..."

Some Chinese people are rich, but China as a whole is unbelievably short on many of the things that qualify countries as fully developed. Shanghai has about the same climate as Washington, D.C.?and its public schools have no heating. (Go to a classroom when it?s cold, and you?ll see 40 children, all in their winter jackets, their breath forming clouds in the air.) Beijing is more like Boston. On winter nights, thousands of people mass along the curbsides of major thoroughfares, enduring long waits and fighting their way onto hopelessly overcrowded public buses that then spend hours stuck on jammed roads. And these are the showcase cities! In rural Gansu province, I have seen schools where 18 junior-high-school girls share a single dormitory room, sleeping shoulder to shoulder, sardine-style. ? James Fallows, in Postcards from Tomorrow Square, an excellent primer on China in the 21st century (via shang-hi)

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