—Labor Day, 2010

ONE day in 2010, a woman from the north paid more than a million dollars for some dogs.

And we were astonished: China is no longer Mao. I don’t know whether anyone there remembers Mao Zedong who once spoke so passionately about the “proletariat”, the “lumpen-proletariat” and the “semi-proletariat”; the poor who would liberate China from its “half feudal and half colonial state”.

These days, it seems that