https://m.163.com/dy/article/IE70EABK0552RR09.html?spss=adap_pcWhen a Beijing child recently told reporters that a 15 million yuan robbery （It should be noted that 15 million in the last century would be worth several billion today.）— the central plot of the crime film The Eight Suspects — was “nothing compared to a single apartment my family owns,” the comment cut deeper than mere childish arrogance. It crystallized a growing unease in China: the sense that a gilded class of elites has become detached from the realities faced by ordinary citizens.
This was not an isolated moment. Just weeks earlier, a young Chinese actress — the daughter of parents working in a government disaster relief office — appeared in public wearing earrings reportedly worth millions of yuan. Her explanation, that they were a gift from her mother, only underscored the implausibility of her family’s official income supporting such extravagance. Many citizens concluded the obvious: that funds intended for earthquake victims had been diverted into private luxuries.
Instead of addressing these allegations, Beijing’s response has been silence and protection. No investigation, no accountability, no reckoning. In shielding elites from scrutiny, the government signals that its loyalty is not to the people it governs, but to the maintenance of privilege.
Such episodes echo an older style of governance — one that resembles Stalinist systems, where power was not constrained by transparency but by the state’s ability to suppress dissent and protect its own. In modern China, public anger may erupt online, but the machinery of accountability rarely follows.
The child’s offhand remark about family wealth and the celebrity’s tone-deaf display of ill-gotten luxury are not mere scandals. They are symptoms of a political system where corruption festers and where the gap between rulers and ruled grows ever wider. And the government’s refusal to act is itself the most telling admission: inequality is not a problem to be solved, but a structure to be preserved.