Meridith May reporting in today's SF Chronicle - fine paper that really deserves a better web site and could do it with our underemployed web designers:

Wu Dinghong needs $600 to buy materials for the shoe repair business he started on a street in China's Sichuan province. Suzhen Xie needs $450 to expand her hog pen. Aodao seeks $600 for a dairy cow.

Entrepreneurs in rural China are pulling themselves out of poverty with the help of a new micro-credit Web site formed five months ago by two 25-year-olds in the Bay Area.

Casey Wilson of Oakland and Courtney McColgan of Menlo Park founded Wokai.org, modeled after the popular Kiva.org microfinance site. Donors choose from a list of borrowers online and make tiny donations. They can follow their money through online photos and updates of the person they fund.

Wilson and McColgan met in a postgraduate Chinese language program at Tsinghua University in Beijing, realized they shared the same interests, and came up with Wokai - which means "I start" - during a St. Patrick's Day party in 2007

Wonks Anonymous applauds these efforts and he believes that donations cannot hurt the global economy or the donor's karma. He does, however, wonder: Where are China's leaders? The government and the armies of rich, frugal far sighted entrepreneurs?

They still seem to be looking for "security" in the dollar and US debt.

Wonks Anonymous would like to inform them that this is not happening but that there are millions, if not billions, of profitable investment opportunities in rural China. These investments will not only bring profits, they will build China's capacity to satisfy the needs of its people and they will create a strong class of small producers and consumers who can demand the goods of Chinese industry.

Of course they will also lift rural China out of poverty, dependency and migrant labor and make more traditional methods of exploitation and extraction of surplus value impossible.

China has a choice. It can continue with its insane attempt to reproduce the self destructive capitalism that Marx described or it can join the modern world where exploitation is replaced by mutual assistance and growth for all.

Memo to the Chinese leadership: Get in touch with these women ASAP. Of course our own movers and shakers could also learn from them.