China’s Growth Story Isn’t What It Seems: Diana Choyleva
The tailwinds that powered the nation’s economic rise are turning into headwinds, and Xi Jinping risks undermining the key drivers of success.
Growing up in Bulgaria with the Soviet bloc crumbling around me, I knew from experience the communist gift for turning gold into dross. But China’s Communist Party (CCP) seems to have managed a different kind of alchemy. In barely more than a generation, it’s nurtured an economic and technological superpower without giving up its monopoly over the state.
President Xi Jinping isn’t the only one to look at China’s achievement and conclude that centralized state control is a more reliable route to economic growth than messy and unpredictable market democracy. But don’t be fooled. China’s success in the past decades has come despite top-down meddling, not because of it. Now more than ever, the CCP needs to loosen its grip if it wants to keep China’s development on an upward path.