China’s new leadership came to power last autumn promising to place less emphasis than its predecessors on how quickly the country expanded and much more on the quality of its economic growth.
Both President Xi Jinping and the country’s premier, Li Keqiang, stressed that China needed to reduce its reliance on business investment and pay more attention to the quality of life enjoyed by its citizens, for instance by cutting the gruesome levels of pollution.
How much this was ever a fully thought through political programme, as opposed to a rhetorical declaration, has at times been in doubt. Earlier this year, Messrs Xi and Li restated their commitment to China delivering a steroid-fuelled 7.5 per cent rate of growth in 2014 – the same goal as was set in the final year of the last leadership. This old-style target came in spite of clear evidence that the economy was overheating.