China Victory Day Parade, 2015. Wikimedia Commons/KOG. Some rights reserved.Something remarkable is happening in China, or has happened. Slowly but methodically, the system of government is being transformed. In his first three years, Xi Jinping has built a new regime, radically harder than the one created by Deng Xiaoping and that he inherited.
The new shape of things became conspicuously visible through a series of mishaps around the middle of the year.
Not only did the stock market implode. In three weeks, the markets lost a third of their value, and later continued to slide. Except for the many who lost money, the crash has not mattered all that much economically, since equities are not very important in the Chinese economy. But it mattered enormously for perceptions.
