Opinion | Can Xi Jinping’s fight against corruption, inequality and mounting debt end China’s ‘Gilded Age’?
- America’s Gilded Age provides a historical lens for assessing Xi’s actions and suggests the problems facing China today do not spell doom
- Xi is trying to start China’s Progressive Era through command and control, though no government has yet overcome the side effects of capitalism by decree
Within the span of a generation, a new super-rich class emerges from a society in which millions of rural migrants toil in factories for a pittance. Bribery becomes the most common mode of influence in politics.
Opportunists speculate recklessly in land and real estate. All of this is happening in the world’s most promising emerging market and rising global power.
This is not a description of contemporary China, but rather of the United States during the “Gilded Age” of the late 19th century. This formative period of American capitalism is remembered as gilded, not golden, because many problems festered beneath the rapid industrialisation and economic growth.
Public backlash against the Gilded Age triggered wide-ranging economic and social reforms that ushered in the Progressive Era. This domestic revolution paved the way for America’s rise as the superpower of the 20th century.
But he also faces a host of problems that come with a middle-income, crony-capitalist economy, particularly corruption. As he warned in his first speech to the Politburo, corruption “will inevitably doom the party and the state”.
