Una visión china desde sus bordes

Julie Chao, nacida en Canadá y hecha periodista en Estados Unidos, ofrece otra visión del país, la de los cambios marginales durante su crecimiento.

Julie Chao has been a journalist since 1992 and has made the trans-Pacific move between San Francisco and Beijing four times. She first visited China as a child in 1978 and has lived there for nine of the last 15 years. Most recently, she was the Asia correspondent for Cox Newspapers. Before that she was a metro reporter at the San Francisco Examiner.
Her work has been published in the Wall Street Journal, the Far Eastern Economic Review, Science magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, the Dallas Morning News and dozens of other newspapers. She received her B.S. in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science from U.C. Berkeley and was born in Toronto.

Por ejemplo, hablando sobre el desequilibrio en aumento entre las ciudades y el campo:

While China has been pouring resources into developing its cities, its countryside is falling further and further behind. Far from the well-dressed young professionals meeting at Starbucks cafes in downtown Beijing and Shanghai, buying their first cars and upgrading their cell phones every year, the two-thirds of the population counted as peasants have tasted few fruits of China's economic boom.
"Ever since the nation began opening to the outside world in the late 1970s, coastal provinces such as Guangdong, Zhejiang, and Fujian have reaped the lion's share of wealth, ... but nine interior provinces ... have remained appallingly poor," said the official People's Daily newspaper.
As much as 70 percent of foreign investment continues to go to coastal areas while a "poverty belt" has formed in the interior regions, the paper said.
In just two decades, China has plunged from one of the most egalitarian societies in the world to one of the most unequal. By some measures, it has the largest wealth gap in the world, worse than Zimbabwe.
"Ironically, everyone thinks China is a great success story and Zimbabwe is a failed state," said Wenran Jiang, a China expert and professor of political science at the University of Alberta in Canada.