Increasing living standards and improving the quality of life for the Chinese people is a core part of Xi’s effort to build the party’s political legitimacy in the post-Mao era. This is the unspoken social contract between party and people: that the public will continue to tolerate an authoritarian political system under the party so long as the people’s material livelihood continues to improve. While Xi is no economist and appears to have surprisingly limited feel for how market economies actually function (he is much more comfortable in the classical political domains of ideology, security,
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