By Andrew L. Jaffee

Chinese Yankee Traders in the People’s Paradise are upsetting the apple cart. The capitalist genie’s out of the bottle. All under the rubric of “communism,” many of the egalitarian masses are struggling — 20,000 rioting now — some are honestly capitalizing, while China’s “communists” have gotten loaded in pursuit of the almighty dollar, er, ah, Yuan:

China’s wealthiest got much richer in the past year, thanks to the nation’s booming economy. The 40 richest businesspeople are now worth a collective $26 billion, up from $18 billion a year ago. China is now home to ten billionaires and their families, up from three last year.

Granted, the Chinese experiment with capitalism has fared longer than the Soviet’s, probably because Mao’s progeny were more monolithic in creating the evil efficiency of the Orwellian nightmare of 1984. The children of the revolution eliminated between 50-80 million members of the “opposition.” But now, laborers rioting against the motherland’s communists?

Several people were injured as up to 20,000 people clashed with 1,000 police in Hunan province on Friday…

Thousands of protests were held last year amid growing discontent over the widening gap between rich and poor and corruption among officials at local level and above.

Think about the concept and how Marx would vomit over the very thought. China’s skylines are looking a lot like San Francisco, Hong Kong, and Singapore. The Shanghai Stock Exchange (SSE)? Doing business with Ford, GM, and Google? Gunning down simple villagers demanding that they be treated equally? Charging citizens for medical treatment — and only caring for those with Yuan?

But China’s Yankee Traders are making a living, and demanding more from life than an olive-drab uniform and a bowl of rice. As more and more are able to get a little satisfaction from hard work, they will start thinking about social, democratic, and religious freedoms.

Unfortunately, the current “communists,” lining their pocket AND sitting on the National People’s Congress, will not so easily want to give up their corner on the markets, and give the masses a piece of the action. Before the communists go out of business, I fear there will be a Tiananmen 1000 — a multi-cultural mass-murder of epic proportions, like Jonestown’s Apostolic Socialism, or the fight that Romania’s Securitate put up during Nicolae Ceausescu’s fall, or Milosevic’s rampage, or Stalin’s purges, or Lenin’s starving of Ukrainians, or Pol Pot’s annihilation of smart people, or Ho Chi Min’s re-education of South Vietnam, etc. etc.