According to a recent report from Beijing Youth, on October 18th, 2005 the International Top Private Luxury Exhibition took its place the very first time in Shanghai in China and was proved an eye-catching event. While ironically, one day before that, on October 17th, 2005, the World Poverty-Eliminating Day was pale by
comparison, with much less applauds and media reports. Facts speak louder than
words. According to the statistics released by the State Bureau of Statistics, in mainland of China, the richest people, 10% of the whole population are in possession of 45% of the total fortune, while 60% of the deposit belongs to 10% of the depositors.
What has attracted my concern is another report from the Chongqing Commercial, that 46 migrant worker representatives were attacked by more than 200 young people armed with steel sticks and 24 of the migrant workers ended up wounded, while
one of them dead, and another one lost.
Being rich is not at all a shame. But in a society where people accumulate their
wealth in an unfair, and too often tragedy-making way, and while they do this at the cost of depriving the justified income of the inferior to satisfy the greedy needs of themselves, the hearts of kind people cannot help to be shaken. It is, after all, much cheaper to hire someone to fight the representative migrant workers than to pay them salaries, though it is commonplace knowledge that this behavior is both against the common morality and against the law. The conscience
seemed to be gone in those people directing the attacking-migrant-worker event.
And at hearing the private luxuries displaced at the exhibition, a question mark
could not help being formed in my mind: Do all these luxuries come from legal channels?
They probably do. Or else the owner should not have the courage to put them at public show. And nowadays, despite the ancient philosophy against the possession
of wealth, people in today’s Chinese society tend to agree that being rich itself is not a bad thing. But in a country still on its way to better legislation,
where the wealth disparity is widening and where the above tragedy has too often
taken places, the social-conscious majority tend to question about the source of the wealth in a skeptical way. It is already high time for our society, and what’s more, our government to assert its influence over laws to better regulate
the distribution of wealth among different social ranks, make guarantee for the basic needs of the underprivileged and provide better guide for the wealth to
spend their money.
