news from the wire--by barbara bush--"tofu lake! tofu lake!"

GAP BETWEEN CHINA’S RICH AND POOR FOUND IN ANHUI PROVINCE

BY BARBARA BUSH

HEFEI, CHINA—For nearly thirty years the Gap between China’s rich and China’s poor has been growing at a terrifyingly fast rate, prompting worldwide condemnation from civil rights groups and doomsday scenarios from many of the worlds leading economists

Now, however, it appears that researchers working in China’s Anhui province have finally pinpointed the Gap’s location

Mr. Peng Dehua, leader of the Fourth Economic Gap Expeditionary Force (FEGEF), announced its finding yesterday at a news conference in the city of Hefei, capital of Anhui province.

“The Gap has been found,” Mr. Peng said, to great applause from the assembled media representatives. “It is slightly north of that one poor place and slightly south of that other one—I would say approximately it is in the middle-right of Anhui.”

Even though its discovery is hugely significant not just for China, but also for the rest of the world, Mr. Peng was quick to add a cautionary note. “Much of the Gap remains a mystery to us. How deep does it go? What color is it? Do any monsters live in it? Faeries? Like many people, I've had a thing for faerie folk my whole life. But the fact of the matter is, right now we just don’t know what's there, and it's best not to get too excited about the possibilities.”

FEGEF had been searching for the Gap for over five years, and had actually been criticized for its rather brazen decision to look in the countryside, rather than the cities.

“Most other researchers criticized our decision to search in the countryside,” said Mr. Peng. “They believed the source of the gap had to be in a major metropolitan area. But we believed all along that the real place to search for this problem, or any problem in China, was at the source, the very base of production and society—the countryside.”

FEGEF said it may take another four years before the gap is fully understood, but solutions on how to fill it are already being proposed in droves. Calls for democratization have already been issued from hundreds of civil and political rights groups, who believe that having greater control over their political futures will encourage China’s poor to fill the gap on their own.

But Mr. Peng is not interested in the opinions of foreign civil rights groups, whom, he says, are incapable of fully understanding the unique situation of China. In fact, he has already come up with his own, simpler solution: filling the entire Gap with a thick tofu solution. “Tofu is cheap and easy to produce. If we can mobilize the entire country to make as much tofu as possible in special backyard tofu barrels, we can fill the gap in a matter of just five or so years.”

Until that time comes, however, the Gap between China's rich and poor will remain--dangerous as ever, and utterly lacking in tofu.