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Will Xi strangle China?

Wang Xiangwei

South China Morning Post

For a long time, it was not widely appreciated quite how much China’s spectacular economic rise relied upon the Communist Party’s embrace of “raw capitalism”, says Wang Xiangwei. The “scale and influence” of its private sector today is huge: it contributes 50% of tax revenue, 60% of GDP and 80% of jobs. But as China “enters a new era”, President Xi Jinping has decided to scale back on “capitalist excesses”. Since last November, the “regulatory(which translates as “once one relaxes controls, there is chaos; once one controls things, they die”). To avoid arepeat, the authorities should look at the bigger picture.