How much Mao is too much? If you’re like me, the answer is anything above zero. Introducing Maoism is quite like the adage of ice cream mixing dog poo; the former cannot improve the latter even a tiny drop. On the contrary, the smallest helping of feces leaves the whole thing smelling like it, rendered completely inedible no matter how carefully crafted and delightful the ice cream might have been at the start.

Xi Jinping is sticking true to his word on the topic of Maoism. How much that word is filtering out is up for debate. In the Western media, China’s some colossus unified under harmonious top-down authority which has allowed the country to both aptly navigate the challenges of the pandemic while eating our lunch when having done so.

Theirs is a boom; ours is an inflationary mess.

Over here in reality, what the Chinese are up against is the same thing the West is. Neither is inflation.

The Communists have just wrapped up their Sixth Plenum, like always encouraging anyone to merely listen.

This history of modern China has been written by some of these special Sixes, and this one has now been written by clearly highlighting and demarcating three major eras. According to the recent plenum, the first was when Mao founded the People’s Republic of China “showing the world that the Chinese people had stood up.”

A good start, according to the Communists, yet even they have had to acknowledge the serious failures with this primitive worldview especially along economic considerations. So it was left to Deng Xiaoping in the second era to clean up Mao’s mess, though that’s not exactly how the official history is telling it.

Each of these are being colored as very natural and evolutionary steps.

Deng had turned “the focus of the Party and the country’s work onto economic development” setting the stage for a “prosperous” society while managing, they say, to hold fast to the overarching Marxist values; “the historic transformations from a highly centralized planned economy into a socialist market economy brimming with vitality.”

While necessary, the second ear also then created its own set of problems which Xi we are today told has been able to clean up; to have “solved many tough problems that were long on the agenda but never resolved and accomplished many things that were wanted but never got done.”

But having launched into this third era, what now?

Common Prosperity, according to what’s been made available of the Sixth Plenum, is supposedly a mix of Mao and Deng. Xi’s intention seems to be leaning on what he says is the best of both, restoring some of the ideological purities of Mao’s age but not going so far as to abandon the entirety of Deng’s project.

So, how much Mao will China end up having combined altogether with some unspecified level of leftover “socialist market economy brimming with vitality?” Can the Chinese withstand much or even any?

Whatever that unknown proportion, what is known is that it will be determined by Xi Jinping alone. The official communique regarding this Sixth placed Xi up in stature with both Mao and Deng, filled with the same over-the-top, overuse of hyperbole: “great”, “glorious”, “correct party.” Xi, it read, clearly the “core”, “backbone”, and “anchor” having made his “guiding role” the true way, the only way forward.

And if anyone had any doubts about the intent, it also told Party Members to “resolutely [uphold] Comrade Xi Jinping’s core position on the Central Committee” before closing with a call to “rally more closely around the Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core.”

Funny enough, China’s Belt and Road Initiative wasn’t mentioned at all.

The question before the world: is Xi merely content “correcting” some of the excesses of the Deng era experiment by restoring ideological purity as the guiding force for major decision-making? Or, is ideology now the central focus of China’s politics by necessity.

Whichever you believe, one thing has been made absolutely certain. No matter which proportion of Mao ends up being restored, it will be greater than zero and as such means – as if we didn’t know a thousand times already – China’s economy is no longer its driving force and animating quest.

If it just so happens to get tripped up along this “third” way, so be it. Maybe a downgrade wouldn’t be the worst thing, if Mao’s in this mix, and what better way to achieve a benign sort of shift than maybe to blame a global pandemic for it. What better way to more Mao.




The latest economic data from the Chinese government have been characterized in typical knee-jerk fashion as if China’s economy has resurrected itself (always “strong”) from a delta COVID mid-year deviation. Especially August, the economy was shutdown and things looked bad.

Opened back up, the path to recovery and global success is reportedly opened back up, too.

Retail sales and Chinese consumers had been at the epicenter of the August setback. On a one-year basis, the growth had been an atrocious 2.5% during it. The estimate rebounded to 4.4% in September and then “unexpectedly” accelerated to 4.9% year-over-year in the latest figure for October. This, apparently, is what’s get everyone so excited, reflation (narrative) short run revitalized (outside China).

China’s consumers are back! Evergrande nothing.

Are they back? See: above.

The annual rate for retail sales had been 12.1% in June and 12.4% for May. Discounting base effects, the 2-year change for both months (in compounded annual figures) was 4.9% and 4.5%, respectively. The 2-year rate for October pretty much the exact same, 4.6%, which had left China therefore the world economy contemplating a “growth scare” before anyone thought to blame delta COVID.

Either way, there’s nothing here even close to pre-2020; easy to blame the disease and its politics for how even the rough and discouraging 2019 downturn today would be considered good times by comparison!



Outside of retail sales, exactly the same if not now worse. Industrial Production rose just 3.5% year-over-year in October, a horrible number when compared to the pre-2020 range which had itself been nowhere near enough for the Chinese economy to climb above Li Keqiang’s 2019 “downward pressure.”

Fixed Asset Investment, or FAI, on the one hand, private FAI, suggests the private economy continues to suffer the same or worse “growth scare” while on the other, public FAI, far closer to Mao than Deng, the Chinese Communists recommitted to communism under Common Prosperity obviously aren’t going to do a thing about it.


Retail sales barely accelerated from August while nothing else did. This isn’t an end to the global slowdown, just more evidence the Chinese are sticking with the new script (which isn’t actually new) because of it.

If all the Xixth Plenum (pun intended) did was publicly suggest China isn’t going full-Mao, it remains for us to consider whether full or not will make any meaningful difference; the ice cream’s still got its own “new” flavor mixed on up in it.

But are the dog droppings going into the bowl the Mao, or the global economy? That’s what the Sixth more than hints; that the desert was defiled by the global economy and Mao’s smelly corpse has been dug up and ground up in it to hide that smell with his own.