You are a very poor farmer in Sichuan and out in the countryside live far away from everything else, schools, medical care, government, roads, running water, everything. You are only poor because the communist government has taken away everything in the name of “the people.”

Your two-year-old toddler swallows farm chemicals and is sickened. With everything you’ve got, you get into the rickety jalopy and drive as hard and fast as you can to make the long trek to the hospital to get the child to treatment.

Your child is unconscious and struggling to breathe and the Chinese hospital, true to its priorities, asks you for payment first. This much? No, that much. Four times as much. You don’t have enough.

No money, no treatment. Can’t you just make this exception? No. They don’t want to be cheated. Go back home and get more money. It’s hours away. Go back and get more money. No money, no treatment, and you must pay in full.

The farmer went back and got the money, maybe from the coffee can under his bed, and might’ve taken him a couple hours to get back home. Rushing against time. And another couple hours to get back to the hospital.

Nevermind, the baby’s dead. And the hospital could care less. It tells you to go bother someone else about it, none of this is their job.

Last night 2000 Chinese in Sichuan learned of this and rioted. They smashed up the hospital, and raided the facility. Cops came to stop them and they burned five police vans. Five people were arrested – I bet they face the firing squad for causing such dread economic losses, people get executed for stuff like that in China.

This is but another sign of trouble in China.

It’s not just Marxism – which reduces human being to mere matter and mere commodities, but the absence of a strong humanist tradition that is creating these fissures in society. In China a hospital is just a business, an imported western concoction, and there’s no invisible western humanist tradition driving it, that makes hospitals possible at all.

That part is what the Chinese powers-that-be miss and the 2000 people who rioted for their rights instinctively grasp – over here, it is called God-given human rights.

Chinese authorities above the hospital level warned the rioters to quit rioting and “trust the government.” They are said to be deeply fearful about this, not because they care but because they instinctively sense that this is a threat to their absolute power. They will do what they can to placate the crowd. But realistically, why do huge groups of people spontaneously riot when the right match is lit? It’s because they’ve all experienced something like this, some kind of brutality from the government or officialdom, which, again and again, no matter how outrageous, got away with it. They have different expectations now and want change.

But until they get rid of the philosophical basis for their society, which is another western import, communism, they will continue to see these scary contradictions until they are destroyed. To have hospitals demands a certain humanism. Communism, being the most inhuman system ever devised, subordinates all humanism to the needs of the state.

It growing increasingly clearer that people have higher expectations derived from the very presence of these hospitals. That capitalism is a whole lot more than the communist commodity approach to all goods and services.

Look out for more trouble, it’s coming faster.