should not be surprising that Xi’s regulatory crackdown on what he defines as the monopolistic private-sector behavior of China’s massive digital firms—the “trusts” of China’s version of the American Gilded Age—is, so far, immensely popular with the Chinese middle class. Xi, always a keen politician, is clear-eyed about what is at stake here. He has harnessed a form of Chinese economic populism with a view to grafting it on to socialism with Chinese characteristics for his “new era.”
