Xi’s Live-to-Work Ideology Is So 1960s
The generation gap between the president and China’s youth is vast. Does he even care?
The future generation.
Photographer: Raul Ariano/BloombergChina’s President Xi Jinping is not a big fan of social welfare. In past writings, he took pains to explain what “common prosperity,” one of his signature policies, was not: It was not egalitarianism or the rise of a welfare state. During the pandemic, when the US government wrote trillion-dollar checks to consumers, China went for trickle-down economics instead. The government’s stimulus came in the form of infrastructure spending and tax rebates to smaller businesses.
Xi has deep-rooted philosophical objections to Western-style consumption-driven growth, seeing it as wasteful and at odds with his goal of making China a world-leading industrial and technological powerhouse, reported The Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with Beijing’s decision-making.