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By 1979, Chinese people were poorer, on average, than North Koreans. I mean, your average per-capita income in China that year was one third of sub-Saharan Africa's.

There's something about China and its rush to capitalism that I find confusing. At the same time, we live in an America where capitalists oppose any government interference with free markets, while in China you have a very controlled, state-planned market where economic growth is better than ours.

Physical hunger and physical poverty is something I could only imagine. I've been poor when I was in China... As kids we never had to starve, but just didn't have enough meat, enough rice.

In the '80s and '90s, China went through a giant change. It needed all resources. At the time, I was in the recycled paper business, and I realized the China market was a blank slate.

China is more prosperous than before. The people have better lives but they are not happy and confident because the scars are still there.

Because of poverty, we must adopt the capitalist means of production to develop our resources to get rich. However, if we ignore the issue of social justice at the beginning of China's industrialization, we will sow the seeds of class warfare in the future.

The Chinese are no slouches when it comes to capitalism.

And it is practically the same in the case of the four or five million poor peasants in France, and also for Switzerland, Belgium, Holland, and two of the Scandinavian countries. Everywhere small and medium sized industry prevails.

It took capitalism half a century to come back from the Great Depression.

The 19th-century pure capitalist model of society was a pyramid, concentrations of enormous wealth in a small group at the top, a not very big middle-class in the middle, and an enormous percentage of the population in the bottom part of the pyramid.