> Actually, the population of China is about 60% peasant.
Sure, they may live near or work on farms, but nowadays they're literate, own cellphones, watch TV, travel widely, etc.
My argument is, maybe we should rethink our notion of the world-system as a tiny sliver of rich people, a slightly larger middle-income tier, and a vast pool of village-bound peasants. Today, it looks more like a huge tier of urbanized or urban-minded middle-income citizens of autonomous nation-states, with slivers of wealth and rural poverty at the extremes. (Or so I'd argue -- I could be wrong.)
-- DRR