broad comfort........................

   The arrival of the market in China has been a humanitarian triumph.  Poverty, endemic in Mao's China, has plummeted in a single generation, from 84 percent in 1981 to 13 percent in 2008.  For hundreds of millions, the Chinese economy has progressed from providing bare subsistence to broad comfort.  As the middle-class ranks swell, there is a market for anything anyone has ever needed or wanted in an industrialized country, from shoes to air conditioners, and it is a very large market;  if you make something that appeals to 5 percent of the Chinese population, you have a potential market the size of France.

-Clay Shirky,  Little Rice:  Smartphones, Xiaomi, and the Chinese Dream