The No.1 reason for success in China? Connections

China’s ancient thinkers knew about the dangers of inequality. “Rulers need not worry about scarcity, but unevenness,” said the “Analects”, a collection of sayings attributed to Confucius, a philosopher of the 6th and 5th centuries BC. China’s leader, Xi Jinping, uses the language of Mao Zedong, but the message is the same. He calls for “common prosperity”, warning that in the West, wealth gaps have caused dangerous social divisions.

In China, the gap between rich and poor rose sharply in the 1990s before levelling off, official data show. Research led by two American scholars of China, Scott Rozelle and Martin Whyte, found that people accepted this, remaining optimistic about their chances of improving their own lot. But their latest findings paint a different picture. Public misgivings about inequality are growing. People are blaming the economic system.