There’s also another kind of living in Shanghai—living large. There are women whose every item of jewelry, apparel, and accessorization bears the mirror- image C’s of Chanel—the golden ass crack. There are men in college-education- priced Hugo Boss suits (which have an unfortunate tendency to be as wide as Shanghai tycoons are high). Long black BMWs and Benzes, missing from the wino-hued daytime traffic, show up at night in front of the Hard Rock Cafe (but not, I noticed, in front of restaurants featuring cobra blood). In a real-estate- agency window was a picture of a comfy suburban house for rent: $10,000 a month. A largish three-bedroom apartment goes for $6,000 a month, a smallish one for $4,500, and golf memberships (also sold by real-estate brokers, in frank admission of snobbery’s price tag) start at 83,000 yuan, which is $10,250, almost 200 times the average monthly Chinese wage. The average monthly Chinese wage is also about what a round of drinks costs in a Shanghai bar where double-dating Chinese fifteen-year-olds were flopping and bobbling drunk on a weekday midnight while the car and driver waited outside and one of the girls cradled a cell phone like the stuffed animal she should have been home in bed with. According to Sharing Rising Incomes, between 1981 and 1995 the Chinese increase in income inequality “was by far the largest of all countries for which comparable data are available.” The disparity of wealth is enough to turn all the people in China, me included, into Communists. Wait a minute. They’re Communists already. In a capitalist country we can shrug off the dress-hog broads, cash brats, and limo’d pudgies. We’ll put up with this kind of thing because it’s the price of freedom. But China doesn’t have freedom. It’s illegal to strike. It’s illegal to go to a church if that church isn’t government approved. In January 1996, Father Guo Bo Le of Shanghai was sentenced to two years in a labor camp for, in the words of the court record, “saying Mass.” Exercising rights of speech or assembly is a nonstarter. According to the U.S. State Department’s 1996 human- rights review, “All public dissent against party and government was effectively silenced by intimidation, exile, or the imposition of prison terms, administrative detention, or house arrest. No dissidents were known to be active at the year’s end.” Sixty-five crimes are punished with the death penalty, including forging tax invoices. Torture is routine. Journalism must conform to the guidelines of the Communist Party’s brazenly yclept Propaganda Department. Women are subjected to forced sterilization, and baby women are aborted so that families
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