7 - Aftermath

Summary

This chapter revisits the three critical historical conditions that made China’s age of abundance possible: the Chinese population, the history of the Cultural Revolution, and the leader Deng Xiaoping. It sets China’s economic prosperity within a historical perspective and argues that such a chapter is not repeatable and cannot be sustained. The chapter lists four headwinds as China moves out of its age of abundance: unfinished urbanization, rising incomes and wealth inequality, population aging, and the return of the state’s omnipresent control.