The Six Ages Of China

The common story of modern China’s development is that it has two ages: Mao, and reform.

The truth is there are at least six internally coherent economic eras within the country’s journey from basket case to superpower. Each with their own rules and obsessions.

That’s certainly the view of Philip Pilkington, who has been crunching the deep data on the Chinese economy, in a new paper for Eurasia Magazine.

This week, in an hour long special, Andrew Collingwood quizzes him on the particularities of these periods: from the black-and-white-cats of Deng, to the red-in-tooth-and-claw market mercantilism of Hu Jintao, up to Xi’s property sinking funds and robot army.

As Philip argues, most US Republicans still imagine that the central danger of China is that it trades unfairly - in truth, the country has moved on from that point on the global value chain.

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