Asia Society’s “China’s Common Prosperity Program: Causes, Challenges and Implications” explores China's Common Prosperity campaign capabilities of reaching equality goals.
"Xi Jinping has something of a propensity toward grandiose displays intended to impress, and the common prosperity program is no different,” Professor, author and political expert, Guoguan Wu, writes. “However, Beijing has yet to formulate policy measures to actually fulfill most of the promises of common prosperity.”
Some of the goals President Xi Jinping has committed to include reducing income inequalities, equalizing public services and actualizing common prosperity in spiritual life; and promoting rural development. He hopes to achieve these goals by 2025, also wants policies that will enforce the percentage of middle-income groups as a share of the population, increase the basic incomes of low-income groups, reasonably adjust high incomes; and ban and police illegitimate incomes.
The report, written by Wu, claims that Chinese officials have created some official documents, but analysts have deemed them to be guidelines as opposed to official regulations. Others consider the efforts to be simply a slogan for Common Prosperity.
“Since the summer of 2021, national authorities and many local governments have issued some official documents trying to elaborate on common prosperity, but the program remains mostly an outline, if not a mere slogan, without much detail on what is to be done,” he points out.
The expert also notes that various older policies and practices have been rolled into "new policies" that were already addressing what was somewhat working, namely programs that dealt with redistributing income, expanding public services and cultural measures related to so-called “common prosperity in spiritual life.”
Wu also highlighted several contradicting statements made by the organization related to fiscal restraints, incentivizing growth coupled with policies requiring the redistribution of success, and administrative bureaucracies.
“At high level, the common prosperity program faces a fundamental dilemma in terms of providing incentives for economic growth versus income redistribution,” Wu writes. “China’s economic growth has already slowed significantly in recent years, due to structural macroeconomic factors; now, if common prosperity is mismanaged, the suppression of private sector business threatens to further contribute to the diminishing of economic momentum.”
Wu does, however, recognize some of the effective moves the leader has made in an effort to achieve economic equality, stating that “he did attempt to mobilize taxation as a major tool for adjusting income disparities, though so far not to conclusive success.”
“The coming years of common prosperity, therefore, will require deft navigation by all those organizations and individuals dedicated to working in this space,” Wu concludes.