In Line Behind a Billion People: How Scarcity will Define China’s Ascent in the Next Decade

Conclusion

All your (economic) base are belong to us

China’s political leaders have engineered a tremendously successful transition from a planned to a market-oriented economy, transforming from poor and predominantly rural to an at least half urban middle-income country along the way. But the unintended consequence of urbanization and liberalization of market forces on Chinese society is that it is being unrelentingly nudged in a more open and less-predictable direction. Karl Marx once postulated that a country’s economic base determines its political superstructure. It is hard to imagine how the same old superstructure can stay firmly balanced on top of a new and somewhat wobbly base.

So, um, what’s going to happen?

We conclude the book by ...