Simple, but wrong. China’s economy was less harmed by the tariff war than expected. It has been far more resilient to the covid-19 pandemic—the imf forecasts growth of 1% in 2020 compared with an 8% drop in America. Shenzhen is the world’s best-performing big stockmarket this year, not New York. And, as our briefing explains, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, is reinventing state capitalism for the 2020s. Forget belching steel plants and quotas. Mr Xi’s new economic agenda is to make markets and innovation work better within tightly defined boundaries and subject to all-seeing Communist Party surveillance. It isn’t Milton Friedman, but this ruthless mix of autocracy, technology and dynamism could propel growth for years.
