Political crackdown has accompanied China's slowing growth
Xi's crackdown has been so widespread that it risks paralysing both government and business
The 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square tragedy got a surprising amount of global coverage, in sharp contrast to the enforced silence on the subject on the mainland. It is a reminder of another contrast between political and economic coverage of the country.
The global media has sensationally covered a political purge that brought down high-ranking party members and heads of state-owned mega-enterprises, and reported on apparent signs of tighter censorship of political expression in the recent past.
Is it rational that these same political trends are not taken into account when economists or financial commentators consider that other always-in-the-headlines Chinese news story: the fate of the world's second-largest economy?
Formation of a solid middle class …was in some ways Tiananmenrelated
At one level, yes it is. Take China's internet sector, which has developed at a sizzling rate in the past decade, even as digital content has remained tightly censored, regulated and sometimes manipulated by hired hands of the Communist Party.
This is a microcosm of China's economic vs political history in the past 30 years. The economy has increasingly liberalised, to the point where the private sector is now the biggest creator of new jobs, and large amounts of investment and tourist capital leaves the country all the time. All this, even as political rights have remained contained.
Indeed, some have argued that there is a positive correlation; that is, that the swift formation of a solid middle class since 1989 was in some ways Tiananmen-related: with national prosperity offered as a salve to political dissatisfaction.
But China's rapid-growth model is reaching its outer limits. The current leaders have already taken several tough but necessary decisions - such as reining in credit growth - that are slowing growth and cooling stock and property prices.
Now, if one believes that headstrong growth in the wake of Tiananmen was a distraction from political openness, then is the flip side that slowing growth might be accompanied by a salve of increased political rights?