If you walk along Shanghai’s famous Waitan (外滩, The Bund) waterfront today, you will see luxury boutiques on one side, and the skyline of Shanghai’s Luijiazui financial district in Pudong across the Huangpu River on the other. The atmosphere there does not exactly feel like walking in a communist country. Formally, China, the world’s second-largest economy, still calls itself a „People’s Republic“ and is governed by a Communist Party that aspires to true socialism. But in reality, there is hardly any other country where the gap between rich and poor is as wide as in China – not even in the USA. The world has long since become accustomed to this contradiction.