Now you argue it'll lead to a population of sheep. Which is, not incidentally, what most Americans seem to believe the Chinese people are now.
Not at all. I argue that people act to protect what they have, and Chinese people are no exception.
"the hundreds of millions of rural poor ... who never wanted anything to do with Beijing"
I wrote, "the hundreds of millions of rural poor or the conquered peoples who never wanted anything to do with Beijing". The second "the" marks a separate phrase.
The fact is China has experienced near miraculous economic growth over the past thirty years.
Your own source notes that the fruits of this expansion have been distributed unequally and that government policies have exacerbated the situation.
As to the "rural poor", according to the latest World Bank numbers China's poverty rate plummeted from 69% in 1978, to 10% in 2004 -- significantly lower than the US's usual 12 to 17%.
I would rather discuss China as China, but I would be remiss not to point out that the US government's poverty line is more than 20 times higher than the World Bank's. In fact, it's just under the World Bank's definition of high income. (Incidentally, the official US poverty rate has fluctuated between 11 and 16% since 1965. The Wikipedia article cites an offline source for the alternative figures but doesn't explain the small discrepancy.)
The latest World Bank numbers retroactively raise the poverty line, giving China a poverty rate of 84% in 1981 and 16% in 2005. Whatever numbers one uses, most of the reduction was in the early 1980s, and most of it seems attributable to reversing the failed policies that produced such shocking poverty. This was vital, but singling out China diminishes the accomplishments of other countries that avoided China's mistakes.
The World Bank itself acknowledges that any poverty threshold is arbitrary. (It's too bad this message gets lost whenever it publishes another round of estimates.) The effects of poverty are numerous and continuous, and calculations of purchasing power parity are not nearly as precise as the numbers imply. In other words, poverty is relative.