Yao Yang on China's Era of "Correction" (Part 1)

"So, my prediction: when will this period of correction end? In 2037." - Yao Yang

Today’s edition opens with an introduction by Gerard DiPippo, Senior Researcher at RAND and Associate Director of the RAND China Research Center. He was previously a Senior Geo-Economics Analyst at Bloomberg Economics, a Senior Fellow at CSIS, and served for 11 years in the U.S. Intelligence Community. His research focuses on China’s economy, industrial policy, financial system, and its ties with the United States. Gerard’s latest article on China’s economy amid the ongoing Sino–U.S. trade war is a must-read. I am delighted to have him share a few thoughts on this excellent and wonderfully unvarnished lecture by the one and only Yao Yang. — Thomas

Few Chinese economists speak as bluntly as Yao Yang. Long a fixture at Peking University and now in Shanghai, Yao mixes establishment credibility with a rare willingness to criticise policy and conventional wisdom. (He’s also a fun debater). Yao doesn’t deny China’s strengths—in manufacturing, technology and its resilience in trade talks—but he believes the country is in a 20-year cycle of “correction”, not smooth ascent. In an August lecture (translated below), he offered some of his hottest takes:

“Our screws are tightened too much.”

China is too fixated on technological catch-up. Nobody talks about “easing up” or the service sector. Innovation is fast, but society is anxious and foreign relations are harder. Yao warns that this relentless “doubling down” unnerves other countries and could trigger a global backlash.

“History is cyclical … the new era must be one of correction.”

Yao rejects the “linear” view of history and borrows from The Fourth Turning (1997) by Strauss and Howe (which also inspired Steve Bannon). He maps China’s trajectory onto their four-cycle framework: Mao’s era as the “High”, the 1980s as the “Awakening”, the 1998–2017 boom as the “Unravelling” and 2018 onward as the “Correction” or crisis phase. In his telling, reform and opening ended after exactly 40 years, and China is now in a 20-year correction cycle that will last until 2037. The symmetry is more rhetorical than empirical, as corruption and financial excess predated 2018, and it has little predictive power (at least in my view). However, it’s interesting to note that Yao believes the current difficulties will persist for so long.

“Do you think you can consume a million yuan just through eating and drinking?”

This is my favourite line—it’s funny and true! Crowded restaurants and airports mean little when home-buying—and the construction inputs and appliance spending it drives—has collapsed. Consumption subsidies won’t offset the negative wealth effects from deflating household savings. The central macroeconomic story of China’s economy today is the collapse of the property sector.

“So do not complain that China’s taxes are high—they are in fact far too low.”

Yao argues China’s tax revenues, at just 14% of GDP, are too low. He calls for property taxes and stricter enforcement of personal income tax, as well as the annual issuance of trillions in central government bonds to rescue local finances. More broadly, Beijing’s (and Washington’s) need to raise taxes will be a key political fissure in the coming years as societies age (unless very optimistic expectations for AI turn out to be right…).

— Gerard DiPippo

Key Points

1. Alongside ASEAN countries, China’s industrialists dominate global manufacturing; the notion that India—“a developing country that has never truly industrialised”—or a re-industrialising US could soon overtake China is “nonsense”.

2. China has room to grow: the appropriate historical–economic comparison is not with Japan in the 1990s, but rather the 1970s—when external shocks forced it to pivot from an export-led model to prioritising domestic demand.

3. However, “turning a large ship is never easy” and Japan’s experience shows that it is very difficult for an export superpower to build up sufficient domestic demand to replace exports.

SINIFICATION IS HIRING
Full- or part-time analyst, £35k–£55k FTE, Remote
Click here for more details
Please send your resume and cover letter by 5 October to:

4. The competitive drive among Chinese researchers and entrepreneurs is fierce and shows no sign of “easing off”; though good for innovation, this also fosters social malaise and risks a foreign backlash against Chinese products.

5. China has experienced a Maoist “high era” of high social unity, a reform-era “awakening” when individual initiative came to the fore and, more recently, eras of “unravelling” and “correction”.

6. Reform and opening-up effectively came to an end in 2018; since then, China has entered an era of “correction”, grappling with some of the excesses which reform—though highly successful and necessary—had unleashed:

   1. Corruption and collusion between officials and business had soared; this is the major obstacle to sustained prosperity in developing countries, and the Party could not afford to become a vehicle for elit interest groups.

   2. Excessive marketisation was creating cut-throat competition and social stratification in certain areas of public goods provision—particularly education—which required correction.

   3. Financialisation and over-leveraging—especially in the property sector and among local governments—were producing hollow growth and undermining innovation.

7. The current “correction” is beginning to ease, with an end to “storm-like” rectifications and signs of a slow bull in the markets; anti-corruption drives will, however, continue, and this era is expected to last until 2037.

The Scholar

Name: Yao Yang (姚洋)
Age: 60 (Nov. 1964)
Position: Dean and Professor, Dishui Lake Advanced Finance Institute, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics
Formerly: Dean of the National School of Development, Peking University (Nov. 2012 – Jan. 2024)
Research focus: China’s political economy, political philosophy and economic development
Education: BA Peking University (1986); MA Peking University (1989); PhD University of Wisconsin-Madison (1996)

YAO YANG: CHINA’S POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC SITUATION IN THE CONTEXT OF OUR ERA’S NARRATIVE | JIABIN FRONTLINE CLASSROOM
Yao Yang (姚洋）
Published by Jiabin Business School on 11 September
Translated by Jan Brughmans
(Illustration by OpenAI’s DALL·E 3)

1. China’s Long-Term Prospects Are Strong

To begin with, China’s economy is, at its core, in good shape.

Let me share some figures with you. The scale of China’s manufacturing sector has now reached a scale that utterly dwarfs the rest of the world. How large is it? China’s manufacturing output accounts for 35% of the global total. If you add up the G7—the club of the world’s seven most advanced economies—together, [their share] still doesn’t surpass that of China and the gap continues to widen. The share of almost all these countries in global manufacturing is falling, while only China’s share continues to rising.

It’s the same when we look at [figures for] value added. In 2010, China’s manufacturing value added (MVA) made up 18% of the world’s total; by 2023, that figure had risen to 29%. I don’t yet have last year’s data, but it has likely already exceeded 30%. The United States was managing to just about maintain its share before the pandemic, but since then has continued to decline. Despite all the talk about “re-industrialisation” [“再工业化”] in the US, the reality is that it has not succeeded.

Japan has fared even worse, with its share having fallen by more than half. Germany, Italy, France and the United Kingdom are all in decline as well. Even India was slipping before 2020 and only saw a modest uptick after the pandemic. In fact, manufacturing as a share of India’s GDP has been falling consistently. It’s a very strange case—a developing country that has never truly industrialised. If you look at the indicator of manufacturing value added, [one sees] they simply have not gone through industrialisation at all. That’s why I think all this talk of India overtaking China is nonsense. I don’t expect to see such a thing happen during my lifetime—it’s impossible. Our per capita GDP only overtook India’s in 1992, but today both our GDP and per capita GDP are nearly six times larger than India’s, leaving it far behind.

By contrast, it’s actually our Taiwan [我们的台湾] which, at least before the pandemic, was seeing its share rise, though it dipped slightly afterwards. South Korea shows a similar pattern. And who has taken up the slack? The ASEAN countries. In reality, what we’re seeing now is China leading the ten ASEAN nations—its younger brothers [小老弟们]—together with Mexico and a handful of African countries, capturing the lion’s share of global manufacturing. All other countries are in decline.

And what about our level of technology? It’s far ahead of our income level. Everyone knows China’s technological capabilities are advancing rapidly, but if you compare us with countries at a similar income level, you’ll see just how powerful China really is. Take the United States as an example: our R&D spending already amounts to 70% of the US level, even though our nominal GDP today is only 60% of theirs.

If we look at higher education, we now have four universities ranked among the world’s top 50—Peking University, Tsinghua University, Zhejiang University and Fudan University. Shanghai Jiao Tong is likely to join them soon; in fact, some rankings already include it. So altogether, China has about five universities in the global top 50. Now, compare that with countries at a similar income level, Malaysia’s best institution, the University of Malaya ranks around 60th in the world. In Brazil, not a single university makes it into the top 100. More than twenty years ago people used to talk about the “Four Asian Tigers”, countries like Thailand and Malaysia. Yet today, Thailand still doesn’t have a university in the world’s top 100. This is the payoff of China’s long-termism [长期主义]—our consistent investment in universities is now bearing fruit.

Seven of the world’s top ten institutions on the “Nature Index” are Chinese. Some claim that China is inflating the figures, particularly in the United States, where there is considerable resentment about it. The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) published an article arguing that China’s high Nature Index [position] is due to Chinese researchers citing one another, so it should be discounted [要打折扣]. One might ask: when Americans used to cite each other’s work, why wasn’t that discounted? This is nothing but sour grapes. I have met many scientists across various fields who say that China is now in a position to challenge the United States, the result of long years of patient accumulation [厚积薄发].

Today, our level of technology clearly places us firmly in the world’s second tier, ahead of Europe, Japan and South Korea. I remember that ten years ago we used to speak more modestly—saying we were still in the third or even fourth tier, behind Europe, Japan and Korea. But now it’s obvious we have surpassed them. Our strongest edge lies in the latest frontiers—AI and the internet. Over the past twenty years, China has correctly selected [点对] almost every “technology tree” [科技树].

2. Japan’s Lost Decades and China’s Present Challenge

Many people like to compare China to Japan in the 1990s—because on some indicators we do look similar. Take for example our demographic ageing, which is even more severe than Japan’s. We are growing old before becoming rich [未富先老], whereas Japan became rich before growing old [先富后老]. What many may have forgotten is that by the late 1980s and early 1990s, Japan’s per capita income, measured in nominal GDP terms, had already overtaken that of the United States. Today, it has fallen to less than half of America’s. Japan truly went through its “lost three decades”—first the stock market bubble burst in the early 1990s, and then the property bubble collapsed.

Many say that China today is the same—our property market keeps falling, our stock market is depressed, and so on. Americans are particularly fond of making this claim; in truth, it serves as a kind of psychological comfort, a way of convincing themselves that China too will endure a “lost three decades”. But the comparison is misguided. If we are to draw parallels with Japan at all, China today is closer to where Japan stood in the late 1970s to early 1980s.

The path we are taking is one Japan has already travelled. There is nothing unique about China in this respect—our neighbouring countries and regions went down the same road long before us.

From the 1950s up until 1971, Japan pursued an export-oriented model. For my generation, back in the 1980s and 1990s, Japanese products were the gold standard for quality. But if you look at the 1960s, they were seen as cheap and inferior. Go back another hundred years and you’ll see that Germany was in exactly the same position—looked down upon by the British.

In 1971 the Bretton Woods system collapsed, and then in 1974 the oil crisis hit—forcing Japan to transform. This is just like us: after the global financial crisis, we too were compelled to change course. We could no longer rely on export-led growth and had to pivot to domestic demand. But turning a large ship is never easy [船大难掉头]. After more than two decades of an export-driven model, suddenly trying to build up domestic consumption within a decade was never going to be simple. People often criticise China for having a low consumption rate, but look at Japan’s figures at the time—their consumption rate was also around 50%, almost identical to ours. And just as we face industrial overcapacity [产业过剩] today, they faced the same back then. I remember an early 1980s Japanese film that told the story of a great steel family’s rise and decline. By the late 1970s, Japan was drowning in excess steel production. What could they do? It was exactly the same story.

We often think of China as the so-called “infrastructure maniac” [基建狂魔], taking on engineering projects all over the world. But that is yet another fallacy. If there was ever a true original “infrastructure maniac”, it was Britain. Two hundred years ago, Britain was already in that role—and it too wasted vast sums. Have you ever been to Scotland? Running across Loch Ness is the Caledonian Canal, built to connect east and west. Construction dragged on for more than a decade and cost the equivalent of our Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macau Bridge—about one-thousandth of GDP at the time. Yet the day it was finished, it was already obsolete. Designed for sailing ships, it was overtaken by the arrival of steamships before it came into use. Today, it survives only as a tourist waterway.

Japan also squandered vast sums. Take the Tsugaru Strait between Honshu and Hokkaido—geologically one of the most challenging spots imaginable; yet Japan insisted on driving a tunnel beneath it. People of my generation will certainly remember the Japanese actor Ken Takakura, an icon of that era, who even starred in a film called The Strait, depicting the tunnel’s construction. And who represents Japanese cinema today? I can only come up with Hiroshi Abe—forever cast as a failed middle-aged man, endlessly adrift and directionless. In many ways, that has become a reflection of Japan itself.

When a nation grows wealthy, it inevitably wants to show off. How does it show off? By hosting the Olympics. Japan first hosted in 1964. South Korea, too, wanted to display its wealth, and did so in 1988. China did the same with the 2008 Olympics. The gap between us is about 20 years—nothing unusual in that.

The Nobel Prizes are about to be announced again. When Europeans or Americans win, the Chinese barely pay attention. But when a Japanese scientist wins, some in China get a little bitter. Since 2000, Japan has won almost every year on average. Yet if you look closely at their laureates, when was the work actually done? Back in the 1970s and 1980s. If my comparison is fair, then we can say with confidence that much of the work Chinese scientists are doing today will be recognised twenty years from now with Nobel Prizes. It’s only a matter of time.

3. Tightening the Screws: The Strain of Economic Competition

We are catching up with the United States in every field, and in some we are actually world-leading. In new energy vehicles, AI, and the integration of internet technologies, China’s cost advantage is simply unmatched—owing to a combination of factors. Everyone knows Luckin Coffee, founded by two EMBA graduates from Peking University’s National School of Development, Lu Zhengyao and Qian Zhiya. Lu was thrown out after a fraud scandal, but Luckin survived. For all his mistakes, Lu is still very much an entrepreneur—a kind of indestructible cockroach [小强].^[1] When he could no longer run Luckin, he founded Cotti Coffee with its roasting base in Anhui, and drove the cost of a cup down to just 2.2 yuan.

In the past, we all thought vertical integration [垂直整合] was uneconomical. If a company tried to cover both upstream and downstream, it was considered not cost-effective, nor efficient for research and development either. But with the rise of the internet, suddenly you realise that taking on an entire vertical can actually save huge costs—in logistics, in inventory, across the board. This is just one example.

When it comes to future technologies, we are not falling behind either. In fields such as nuclear fusion, quantum computing, quantum communications, and optoelectronic chips, China is already in the front rank—and it is entirely possible that the ultimate breakthroughs will come not from the United States, but from China. In fact, China is already at the forefront of quantum computing and quantum communications.

I am simply presenting some macro data to illustrate that China has no problem technologically. In fact, I personally feel that from top to bottom, the screws have been fastened far too tight [螺丝拧得太紧了]. Every meeting we attend, we talk about the same thing—technological catch-up and surpassing [技术赶超]. Nobody talks about easing off, nobody talks about developing the service sector. This, in my view, has both advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is obvious: China’s pace of technological progress will only accelerate. The downside is that society as a whole is under constant strain, and it makes our foreign relations harder to manage.

At every conference I attend, foreign participants say to us: “Can China ease up a bit, give us some breathing room?” At one such meeting, a retired foreign official asked directly: “Do you think China will be punished for doing this? Who will punish China?” The question left everyone speechless. The reality is that from top to bottom, including our entrepreneurs, China is doubling down: the more others criticise us, the harder we push. This leaves other countries extremely nervous. Might they eventually unite against China? That is something we must consider. Later, I will speak about Trump—he provided us with a window of opportunity, as he relaxed external pressures on China. But we cannot rule out the possibility that the next US president might, like Biden, start tightening the screws on China again. This is something we need to consider.

4. A Necessary Correction: The Excesses of Reform and Opening-Up

Second, I want to talk about the economic restructuring since 2018 and explain why our future is bright, even as profits have grown thinner and competition more intense [利润越来越薄，越来越卷]. How should we understand this process? I think we have to go back to the forty years of reform and opening-up [改革开放]: what we achieved, and what problems those achievements have created.

Many people say the “new era” [新时代] began in 2012, but I believe it actually began in 2018. By that reckoning, reform and opening-up ran from 1978 to 2018—exactly forty years. The achievements of reform and opening-up were enormous; it was a decisive move by our Party and no one denies its importance. But those forty years also produced many real problems.

The first problem is corruption [腐败]. The second is collusion between officials and business [官商联盟]. I study political economy and development economics and I can tell you: developing countries fail to develop not because they don’t know how. That’s impossible. The economics textbooks we use in China are the same as those used in the United States or Namibia. There is no such thing as a national leader who has no idea how to promote economic development—that simply doesn’t happen. In fact, many African leaders were educated in Europe or America, and they believe in the Western model even more strongly than we do. So why hasn’t it worked? In my view, the root cause lies in collusion between officials and business interests.

When a company grows too large, it simply buys off the government, erects towering barriers to entry and seizes control of both politics and the economy. The Philippines is the classic example: everyone knows its politics are chaotic, but fewer see how deeply politics and business are intertwined there. In many provinces two or three families take turns running the show—politics and the economy are monopolised by a handful of clans. Try to break through and they’ll have you eliminated. In 1978 the Philippines’ per capita income was five times China’s; today our per capita income is at least three to four times theirs. In other words, over the past 45 years fortunes have reversed by roughly 15 to 20 times. Collusion between officials and business is therefore absolutely intolerable.

The third problem is excessive marketisation [过度的市场化], with the education and training sector as the most obvious example. In the early 2000s we put forward the idea of turning education into an industry—a policy that was clearly flawed. No country in the world has a fully commercialised [产业化] education system; basic education everywhere is dominated by public provision, even in the United States. The US once experimented with Friedman’s idea of vouchers, and that too ended in failure. By pushing the commercialisation of education, we ended up marketising it from kindergarten onwards—and that was a grave mistake. This is why our leaders have said that education concerns the future of China’s children and grandchildren. Some of you here are still young, with children in school, and the source of your daily anxiety is their education. How did this situation arise? It is the result of us tightening the screws step by step [都是我们一步步拧螺丝拧上来的].

The fourth problem is excessive financialisation [金融化]—the financial sector has grown far too large. Over the past decade, our policymakers have drawn an important lesson from the American experience: the hollowing-out of US industry was driven by the outsized scale of its financial sector. When I’ve told Americans that our policymakers see it this way, they’ve agreed, saying, “That’s exactly how we see it too”. Even Trump thinks the same—at a commencement address at the University of Alabama, he told graduates not to go to Wall Street but to find jobs in factories. This is why we need to rein in our financial sector: it has become too big. And closely linked to this is real estate, which has grown far too large as well. Property is heavily financialised, and once too much capital is tied up in real estate, there is less room left for innovation. From the perspective of policymakers, all of this is a manifestation of excessive financialisation—and it must be corrected.

The fifth problem is the excessive debt of local governments—especially off-balance-sheet borrowing and the uncontrolled rise of local government financing vehicles (LGFV) [城投债]. Local governments carry two types of debt. On-balance-sheet debt [表内债] is what has been formally approved through the People’s Congress, now totalling around 70 trillion yuan nationwide, including both local and central government. Off-balance-sheet debt [表外债], however, comes through local government financing companies. The exact amount is unknown—in fact, it may be impossible to measure precisely—but estimates put it anywhere between 60 and 100 trillion yuan. Local governments have been borrowing recklessly, piling up huge sums to fund “white-elephant projects” [白象工程]. This, too, is a serious problem.

This is why we must fight corruption and break collusion between officials and business. The Party and the government must maintain impartiality [中立性] in Chinese society, representing all the people of China. We cannot allow any single class or interest group to capture the government, or for the government to serve only a narrow segment of society. The achievements of the past forty years are inseparable from the Party and the government maintaining that impartiality. Because of it, we could act boldly, without being swayed by vested interests. If the Party were merely the political vehicle of a single class, certain reforms—such as state-owned enterprise reform—would never have been possible.

5. The Era of Correction: Education and Property

We had to regulate the platform economy, and some got caught in the crossfire [被捎带脚扫了一下].

In the education and training industry, the aim was to rein in the excessive marketisation of education. Admittedly, the measures may have gone too far. But should the sector have been cleaned up? I believe it had to be. The tutoring industry had grown into a parallel system alongside K–12 education. Many teachers had stopped teaching properly in class — you had to go to a tutoring centre to actually learn. And if that’s the case, what’s the point of having schools at all?

I myself serve on the Academic Committee of the China Private Education Association^[2], and I too believe that private education has its place. But it is absolutely wrong for private education to completely replace public education—especially at the level of basic schooling. In fact, this is already happening, though many are unaware of it. In a lot of counties, three-quarters of the schools are private, charging very high fees. Look at Shanghai: private primary and secondary schools are already dominant. That in itself might not be a problem, but it has created a very unhealthy trend—an elitist stratification of education. These private schools don’t just interview the children; they also interview the parents and even ask what the grandparents do for a living. It has turned into a kind of pedigree system. That’s a distortion which brings forth many serious problems.

In the past, because people believed marketisation was the right direction, it was allowed to develop unchecked. But in truth, it did create serious problems. As scholars we recognised this too, but as to how to address it—that was another matter.

And then there is the clean-up of real estate. 2021 marked the peak of the property sector, after which the “three red lines” policy [Note: 三条红线, introduced in August 2020 to limit debt leverage among property developers] was introduced. We are now in the fourth year of adjustment, soon to enter the fifth, and the market is still declining. The goal is to turn real estate into a normal industry, not one that conjures up wealth out of thin air. Some people — like Xu Jiayin [Note: the chairman of the Evergrande Group, still under arrest and investigation for bribery and corruption]—were never really building housing properly, and were just playing the markets [投机].

There is also the task of managing local government debt and requiring local authorities to repay what they owe. In the long run, all these measures will benefit China’s economy, society and even its political system. But in the short term, they inevitably bring turbulence—to our industries and to the economy as a whole.

From a young age we are taught the Western linear view of history—the belief that history always moves forward. But that is wrong. History is cyclical. If one wants a prettier description, it is a spiral that rises with time. But those cycles can be very long, while human life is always short.

During the planned economy era, we lived under collectivism, endured hardship and tightened our belts. That was useful, for many of today’s industries were built on the foundations laid then. I feel this very personally. Are there any students here from Xi’an? If you are from Xi’an, you must know Xi’an XD Group [西电公司]. Established in 1956, it is a microcosm of China’s heavy industry.

The first twenty years of reform and opening-up were a burst of individualism—a reaction against the planned economy. Deng Xiaoping put it very simply: “open up to the outside, and invigorate domestically” [“对外开放，对内搞活”], unleashing individual initiative.

The next twenty years of reform and opening-up, from 1998 to 2017, were a period when every kind of force was unleashed. Once individualism had broken out it spread in all directions. That’s why so many of us look back fondly on those two decades—because they were the years when incomes rose, weren’t they? I myself left Peking University in 1989 and returned in 1997. The real transformation of Peking University, even of Beijing itself, began after 1998. China surged upward with incredible momentum: living standards improved, and a whole range of new ideas and schools of thought emerged. But precisely because all these forces came pouring out, they also gave rise to many of the problems I’ve mentioned just now.

The new era, then, must be one of correction [矫正]—a time to address and put right the problems that emerged during reform and opening-up, especially in its last twenty years. History moves in such cycles. In fact, what I am saying here has also been influenced by a book I recommend to you all, The Fourth Turning [Note: The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy is a 1997 book by Neil Howe and William Strauss, proposing the idea of recurring historical processes and archetypes]. Written by two Americans in 1997, it argues that US history follows an eighty-year grand cycle, each containing four smaller cycles.

The first stage is what they call the “high period”— when everyone thinks alike and pulls in the same direction [劲往一处使], much like China in the Mao era. The second stage is the “awakening”, which for us was the 1980s. Then comes twenty years of “unravelling”, when the forces unleashed by awakening scatter in every direction. The final stage they call the “crisis”, when all these contradictions collide and trigger upheaval. Personally, I prefer to call it a period of “correction” [矫正].

6. The Next Era?

So, my prediction: when will this period of correction end? In 2037. [Note: The projected year of the 23^rd National Congress]. You should keep that timeframe in mind when planning your business decisions.

The symposium on the private economy in February this year, I believe, sent out a positive signal [Note: Held on 17 February 2025 and attended by Xi Jinping and some of the most prominent Chinese tech firm leaders]. It indicated that the main rectifications were basically over, and that there would no longer be sweeping, storm-like corrections. Of course, anti-corruption will continue, but in other areas the approach may become gentler and more measured [更加和风细雨].

We can already see signs of a slow bull emerging in the stock market, and foreign capital is beginning to return. I’ve spoken with some officials in Shanghai, and they told me that since this spring there has been a clear inflow of foreign investment back into the city. The number of foreigners in Shanghai is also gradually rising. All of these are positive signs.

The next task, which I will discuss below, is to boost domestic demand and bring an end to deflation as soon as possible [Note: available in our “part two” post].

---

^[1] From Xiao Qiang, the name of the lead character’s deceased pet cockroach in the 1993 Hong Kong film “Flirting Scholar”

^[2] 中国民办教育协会学术委员会

READ MORE