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China’s ‘common prosperity’ agenda
China’s rich apparently don’t like it, Western commentators call it suicidal — so what exactly is this ‘common prosperity’ that Xi Jinping is promoting in his third term as leader? In part two of three-part series, JENNY CLEGG explains
China’s immediate priority is to upgrade its technology. Escaping the dead end of trading cheap labour exports for high-end imports means pouring investment into skills and science, innovating new technologies to drive the industrialisation of the future.
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FIRST mentioned by Mao Zedong in 1953 in China’s transition to socialism, the phrase “common prosperity” was also used by Deng Xiaoping — his call for some to “get rich first” always qualified with the phrase “so that they can help others to catch up.”
Now Xi is taking “common prosperity” as a defining feature of China’s socialist modernisation — at the core of the two-stage plan, laying a basic socialist foundation by 2035 to then advance to modern socialism by 2049, the 100th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China.
The gap between rich and poor is to be reduced, but what common prosperity is not is an equalisation of incomes or a radical redistribution from the rich to the poor. Xi talks rather of increasing the incomes of low-income earners and expanding the size of the middle-income group.
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