Wealthy China

Pretty amazing. A country of 1.3 billion people, so latterly an impoverished, backward, totalitarian communist country where the people were oppressed in subservience to a Marxist ideology which claimed millions of lives in a paroxysm of a cultural revolution that was insistent on burying the magnificent history, traditions and culture of its past has managed to re-invent itself as one of the most important, wealthiest countries of the world. Its recent past is recent enough and blemished enough to make this all the more sensational.

That Beijing continues to manifest its oppressive hold on minorities within its vast land holdings, and that the country itself wrestles with so many difficulties, from environmental degradation and religious persecution, from manufacturing fall-out of chemical and carbon pollution impacts, and the occasional visitations of stupendously destructive natural disasters, to minority unrest and a host of other situations that require urgent attention, not the least of which is migratory workers and their families living in poverty, along with human rights abuses almost endemic to the society at large, is an unfortunate part of the success story.

Super-booming China has vast human and natural resources, and it now has financial resources it could only dream of, before it opened the country up to Chinese-style free enterprise. New data has been released that demonstrates just how powerfully the new economic system has impacted on the lives of those Chinese fortunate enough to be enterprisingly entrepreneurial and aspirationally forward-looking. While the United States still leads in the number of its billionaires, at 359, China is moving up with 130 of its own billionaires, although it's also estimated that number can be doubled as a result of some Chinese billionaires being shy of revelations.

Moreover, Chinese women make up more than half of the world's richest self-made women, according to the annual Hurun report. Apart from the leading U.S. billionaire-club numbers, China ranks second on the list. There is, of course, a vast differential in population size, with the U.S. having roughly one-third the population of China. But the U.S. free enterprise system has been a long time brewing, and China is new to the game. And here's an interesting statistic; whereas elsewhere in the world ranking billionaires are more elderly than not, in China 94 individuals under the age of 40 made the billionaire list.

Remarkable. For what it's worth.