If they continue to be financially squeezed with pricier real estate and higher educational and health costs, this base is likely to erode, swelling the numbers of those who have become frustrated and angry with China's rulers.
Rural areas, which have been squeezed to support the urban boom, are experiencing large-scale, though fragmented, unrest.
As there is not much developmental activity in the rural areas, there has been a massive influx of rural labor to the cities. It is this easy availability of seemingly inexhaustible cheap labor that has enabled China to become the factory of the world. But it has a cost.
The country has become a volatile mix of all kinds of imbalances like the urban-rural divide, social and cultural alienation of rural workers in an unwelcome and exploitative urban environment, wide income disparities with the country's new rich and their patrons and partners from the CCP ranks acting like kings.
This is not all. China's environmental degradation, including poisoned rivers and cities with an overhang of industrial pollution -- resulting in many people having to wear face masks -- is an example of a disaster that is already happening. And it has even reached villages. According to a recent AP report quoting Chinese state media and local officials, "At least 879 people from two Chinese villages [in northwestern Gansu Province] have been taken to hospital with lead poisoning, probably caused by airborne waste from a nearby lead factory."
As for human rights, an example of their gross violations is the harvesting and sale of the body parts of dissidents, particularly Falun Gong prisoners. The country's judicial processes are a sham.
The latest example is the mock trial and sentencing to four years imprisonment of the blind activist Chen Guangcheng (陳光誠), on the spurious charge of "organizing a mob to disturb traffic" and "damaging property." His real "crime" was to expose the practice of forced late-term abortions as part of China's one-child policy.
Editorializing on this, a Canadian newspaper, the Gazette, wrote: "This too is modern China. Profound injustice, it turns out, can co-exist with dramatic economic progress."
But for how long?
Sushil Seth is a writer based in Australia.
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