As the debate widened, words once benign took on a political edge. Lin Yifu liked to describe the economic boom as the “China miracle,” but the liberal writer and critic Liu Xiaobo took issue with the phrase; he wrote that all he could see was “the ‘miracle’ of systemic corruption, the ‘miracle’ of an unjust society, the ‘miracle’ of moral decline, and the ‘miracle’ of a squandered future.” The boom was becoming “a robber baron’s paradise,” he wrote. “Only with money can the Party maintain control of China’s major cities, co-opt elites, satisfy the drive of many to get rich overnight and crush
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