Obesity: The dark side of western Affluence is rising in China

When a country develops economically its wealth and prosperity rises to levels it had never known before. It's standard of living increases and so to usually does it's collective waistline. The nation of China is in the middle of experiencing this downside to success right now and it only seems to be getting worse.
With a population of almost 1.5 billion people it is currently estimated that there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 million people who are now classified as either overweight or obese. That is the same size as the entire population of the United States. This figure includes the more than 10 million children who fit this categorization. This represents an eight fold increase since 1992.
The culprits are all the usual suspects. The more the economy expands in China the more people work. The more they work the less time they have to eat right and the more likely they are to just duck into a local fast food place and quickly and cheaply load up on unhealthy choices to eat that are fast and convienient. The rapid modernization that is occuring there is also leading to fewer opportunities for the average Chinese to get any kind of exercise. As their wealth increases they choose to live in more modern apartment buildings with elevators and parking garages for their new cars and larger rooms in their apartments into which they can fit new couches that can be located nicely in front of the new wide screen tv's that are flying off the shelves of the electronic stores in all their major modern cities.
The government is aware of the growing problem and in an attempt to stem the tide it is limiting the number of fast food places in the country. Franchises like McDonalds and K.F.C. currently have about 1000 and 700 locations in China respectively. The government is attempting to limit the number of new places that it allows to open but it does not want to hurt economic expansion too much so it is finding itself in a position of having to make a choice between the health of its citizens and the well being of its economy.
Another factor adding to the problem is the policy in China, due to the fact that the country is overpopulated, of only allowing a couple to have one child. That one child tends to get spoiled by parents who are old enough to remember the bad old days when food was not as plentiful and so they tend to provide more for their children then they had when they were young. Many chinese feel that it is a good sign of prosperity to be overweight. There are movements in China both cultural and governmental that are attempting to dispell this growing belief and replace it with the social stigma that exists in the west about being overweight in an attempt to turn the tide.