More than half of the world’s people alive today were born after 1980 and have only known a China that was growing relentlessly. But there is nothing foreordained about China’s rise, and CCP officials know it. Beginning in the 1970s, China benefited from a serendipitous combination of five factors: an unusually welcoming geopolitical environment; a leadership committed to economic reform; institutional changes that diluted one-man rule and empowered a professional bureaucracy; the greatest demographic dividend in history; and an abundance of natural resources. Understanding what enabled
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