The BBC World Service‘s Assignment programme reports from China’s old heavy industrial heartland on the desperate plight of the workers there. It isn’t news but it is poignant and depressing to learn that away from the glitter of the coastal provinces workers are struggling to make ends meet and government officials are robbing both them and many of the new neo-capitalist entrepreneurs that emerge.
I didn’t realise that in China there is no longer a welfare system or free medical care as I had assumed there would have been during the more “pure communist” era.
