Finance & economics | Free exchange

Just how Dickensian is China?

Inequality is better than it was. But it doesn’t feel that way

WITH ITS fast trains, super-apps, digital payments and techno-surveillance, China can seem like a vision of the future. But for some scholars, such as Yuen Yuen Ang of the University of Michigan, it is also reminiscent of the past. Its buccaneering accumulation of wealth and elaborate choreography of corruption recall America’s Gilded Age at the end of the 19th century, an era that takes its name from a novel by Mark Twain and Charles Warner.

This article appeared in the Finance & economics section of the print edition under the headline “Black cat, white cat, fat cat, thin cat”

China's new reality

From the October 2nd 2021 edition

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