China’s “Comfort Class” | The Bling Dynasty, National Geographic Magazine: China Professional Lives with Her Cultural Revolution Era Parents

Rachel is a “headhunter” for the Comfort Class, which is the buffer class between first world needs and third world sweatshops or between first world companies and third world consumers. Rachel is single and lives at home with her parents, who were part of one of the worst social experiments in history. Mao unified the country, but then was responsible for the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, countless famines. Then, Deng proclaimed, “To get rich is glorious” and opened the flood gates to the “Special Economic Zone” cities on the south coast, creating the largest peacetime human migration in history. Many 20-somethings say that Tiananmen Square had to be put down or it would have hurt Deng’s economic plans and they would not have their nice apartments with flat screens in every room.

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