5 September 2020

China is the new rich man’s playground

ROGER BOYES

Few people were surprised when a bromance developed between the brainy if ponderous French economist Thomas Piketty and the powerful but plodding leader of China. Piketty produced a 700-page indictment of capitalism and concluded it was a system that made the rich richer and kept the poor in their place. Since the book trashed the American model of wealth creation, Xi Jinping eagerly plugged it. For Xi, the Frenchman’s work showed that Marxist political economics was still relevant. Chinese communists rushed out to buy the translation, if only to place the volume prominently on their shelves, and it became that rarest of creatures, a bestseller on economic theory.


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