Ordinary Chinese women going about their business against the backdrop of the glamorous Western model in the billboard caught my eye here. When I took the image, I did not notice the four red characters in the upper right of the image - "xiaokang shenghuo" meaning a relatively prosperous life. Achieving a relatively prosperous life for all Chinese was one of the goals of Deng Xiaoping's reforms which first began some 30 years ago. In fact there was a Party conclave just several days ago celebrating the anniversary of what China calls the reforms and opening to the world. The Party claims with some justification that most people and China as a whole now have reached a basic level of prosperity or "xiaokang shenghuo". As this and many of the other images posted here suggest, Chinese in big urban centers like Beijing do indeed live a comfortable and reasonably prosperous life. The Party's claim becomes problematic, however, when one looks at China's vast countryside. The income gap separating urban and rural Chinese is great and becoming greater. While there are areas of prosperity in the countryside, there are also significant pockets of poverty. And with China's export driven economy rapidly heading south, millions of migrant workers are losing their jobs in urban areas and going back to an uncertain future in the countryside.