On Sept. 30, as Chinese citizens prepared for a “Golden Week” holiday, People’s Daily, the flagship newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), launched a carefully timed editorial campaign. For several consecutive days, its second page, reserved for authoritative commentaries, carried essays under the banner “Special Series on China’s Economy Under the Guidance of Xi Jinping Economic Thought.” Each was signed with the pseudonym Zhong Caiwen.
In China’s political communication system, such pseudonyms are not random. They are signals, collective voices for CCP organs to articulate and test major policy directions.
First appearing in People’s Daily in 2024, the name “Zhong Caiwen” itself is a homophonous construct: “Zhong” connotes “central,” “Cai” refers to finance and economics, and “wen” means “article” or “commentary.” It likely represents the collective voice of the Central Commission for Financial and Economic Affairs (CCFEA), the CCP’s top economic policymaking body.
Similarly, unnamed sources, used in parallel with the pseudonym system and featured as interviewees in official outlets, also play a signaling role. In 2015, while then-Premier Li Keqiang was on a foreign trip, People’s Daily published an interview with an unnamed “authoritative person,” widely understood to be CCFEA head Liu He. That piece advocated “supply-side structural reform” and signaled a shift in policy emphasis toward deleveraging and efficiency for years to come.
The use of such roundabout methods reflects a long-standing culture of ambiguity and allusion in Chinese politics that shapes the CCP’s propaganda work. The practice also allows official messaging to carry institutional authority while softening its tone for a public increasingly attuned to more pluralistic and media-savvy discourse.
From the 1960s onward, successive CCP leaderships have relied on pseudonymous writing groups to articulate guiding principles or to prepare the ground for major policy transitions. Examples range from Mao Zedong-era commentaries during the Sino-Soviet split to the “Huang Fuping” essays in Jiefang Daily that helped restart reform after 1989. In recent years, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, for instance, has published under the pseudonym Zhong Jixuan to communicate its disciplinary priorities and shape public understanding of anti-corruption campaigns.
Many observers have dismissed the series as little more than political pageantry, designed to drum up economic confidence and set a positive tone. That reading isn’t wrong, but it’s incomplete. What the essays lack in novelty, they make up for in clarity. Read together, the new essays offer one of the most structured explanations yet of how China’s leadership views its economic transition: not as a response to crisis but as a deliberate reorganization of priorities for an era defined by slower growth, geopolitical constraints, and structural maturation.
The early essays in the Zhong Caiwen series build a unified conceptual foundation for the main economic message that follows. The first piece situates China’s trajectory in a world of volatility. It argues that the ability to maintain strategic composure amid geopolitical uncertainty is now a form of comparative advantage. The subtext is that the world may be unpredictable but China’s model, anchored in planning and continuity, is well positioned to stay on course.
The second essay traces that stability to institutional architecture. It highlights party leadership, theoretical adaptability, long-term planning, and the fusion of state coordination with market mechanisms as mutually reinforcing, touting what might be called a “managed equilibrium”—a system that, according to the author, is superior.
The third piece turns to the present and has an unusually candid tone. It openly acknowledges a series of economic headwinds, including weak domestic demand, fiscal pressures on local governments, deflationary tendencies, and persistent “supply-demand mismatch.”
Such direct enumeration of risks is notable in central CCP media and suggests an effort to manage expectations ahead of the 15th Five-Year Plan discussions, at the Fourth Plenum meeting this month. Yet the essay’s rhetorical pivot is equally striking: Rather than framing these weaknesses as structural failures, it casts them as transitional symptoms of technological upgrading and industrial realignment.
The message is that the current “pain points” are the by-products of necessary transformation, not indicators of systemic malaise. The reassurance thus projects confidence while preparing both domestic and international audiences for a period of slower but more stable adjustment, reinterpreting the slowdown as evidence of transformation, an economy enduring short-term friction in exchange for long-term resilience.
A similar message was reinterpreted in the final pieces, where the series closes by defining “certainty” itself as a growth asset and portraying China as a force for global good. It touts China’s achievements in poverty reduction, green development, and openness through initiatives such as the Belt and Road Initiative while urging the world to look past ideological divides and view China’s rise on its own terms. Against a backdrop of political turnover and policy volatility in the West, it argues that China’s strength lies in its ability to sustain direction and coherence.
The middle installment on Oct. 3, “China’s Economic Transformation and Upgrading Contain Major Opportunities,” goes into operational detail. It identifies traditional sectors such as chemicals, machinery, textiles, and light industry as the backbone of a still-dominant industrial base that must be upgraded, rather than replaced.
Automation, digitalization, and environmental retrofitting are positioned as the mechanisms that can turn legacy industries into productive laboratories. At the same time, advanced manufacturing, artificial intelligence, robotics, and biopharma are elevated as the new pillars of “industrial self-reliance.”
This clarifies the party’s dual goals: preserving social stability through continuity of employment while gradually shifting China’s manufacturing system up the value chain.
Innovation, the essay continues, is the decisive variable. It celebrates the rise in intensity of research and development—3.6 trillion yuan (about $500 billion) in 2024, approaching Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development levels—and the growing integration of research with industrial application. The essay points to an “engineer dividend,” referring to China’s 5 million-strong annual cohort of STEM graduates, and encapsulates the leadership’s belief that human capital, organized at scale, constitutes a national endowment. This is a clear vision of creativity institutionalized through coordination rather than spontaneity. Its virtues are evident: speed, alignment, and security. What goes unspoken is the cost: diminished space for bottom-up experimentation and decentralized risk-taking.
That omission is consequential. The lack of grassroots initiative has become increasingly visible in the very economic headwinds the leadership now acknowledges. Local bureaucracies, under acute fiscal pressure, have in many cases turned to predatory fee collection and arbitrary enforcement to fill budget gaps, placing heavy strain on the private and entrepreneurial sector.
For many start-ups and small private firms, the combination of a weak macro environment and regulatory overreach has created an atmosphere of caution. The state’s “security first” lens—applied to data governance, cross-border information flows, and even academic collaboration—has compounded this, dampening venture capital activity and accelerating the flight of private equity.
The challenge for China’s innovation drive is not technological capability but institutional elasticity: whether a system designed for control can also nurture the kind of uncertainty, long-term experimentation, and tolerance for failure that global technological leadership ultimately requires.
This tension extends into the domain of consumption and social investment, where the essays’ confidence gives way to ambiguity. The analysis correctly diagnoses weak household confidence, rather than insufficient liquidity, as the principal obstacle to sustained demand. The proposed remedy aligns with long-standing prescriptions: strengthen the social safety net to reduce precautionary savings and stimulate consumption indirectly.
The text calls for greater investment in child care, elder care, health care, and education—fields where the gap between need and provision remains wide—but offers few clues as to how these ambitions can be realized. Local governments remain fiscally constrained; household incomes are stagnant; private employers remain cautious; and, as analysts note, a “massive crisis of confidence” has left private firms reluctant to invest or hire, with the business community continuing to greet official reassurances about private sector support with skepticism.
One of the more telling signals in the Zhong Caiwen series lies in its semantic shift from the earlier emphasis on “boosting” demand to a focus on expansion and upgrading. The change reflects recognition that earlier tools such as subsidies and trade-in programs have largely run their course. These policies, designed to encourage households to replace older cars, appliances, and electronics with new purchases, have produced short-term spikes in durable-goods consumption but limited lasting momentum. Their effect is likely to weaken in the second half of the year, because of both a high base effect and diminishing marginal returns, as muted job and income gains prevent a full rebound in consumption.
With the limits of traditional stimulus increasingly apparent, the discussion now turns toward service-led consumption, particularly in sectors such as culture, commerce, sports, and tourism, where local governments are experimenting with new initiatives to stimulate activity.
This area may hold the greatest political space for the local experimentation that has largely been limited during a Xi era defined by top-down projects, allowing officials to pursue visible, low-risk projects that align with national priorities while addressing local economic pressures. Still, the near-term effect is likely limited, as supply side buildup in service infrastructure, labor capacity, and institutional support will need to precede any significant demand recovery.
This approach nonetheless signals an important philosophical shift at the level of political will. Instead of viewing redistribution as a constraint on growth, the state now portrays it as a new source of momentum—particularly in service sectors tied to improving people’s livelihoods. Health care, elder care, education, and child care are all portrayed as areas rich with market and employment potential. The Oct. 3 article notes, for instance, that with more than 300 million citizens over the age of 60, the country faces critical shortages of nursing home beds, doctors, and nurses. Addressing these “urgent livelihood concerns,” from child care and schooling to elder care and health services, could generate millions of new jobs and open vast domestic markets. Still, political intent is not synonymous with policy execution.
If anything, the next set of priorities makes clear that infrastructure remains the state’s preferred lever for stabilizing growth. The goal, as stated, is to merge physical investment in areas such as rail and highways with technological upgrading such as smart-city systems, using infrastructure as both an economic stabilizer and a channel to diffuse growth into China’s less developed central and western regions.
Urbanization policy follows the same logic. With the national urbanization rate plateauing, emphasis has shifted from expansion to urban quality: renovating old neighborhoods, upgrading public utilities, improving flood control, and modernizing public transit. This reframing optimistically turns the real estate downturn into an opportunity for transformation.
Yet this engineering logic cannot fully dispel the deeper malaise confronting the economy—the interlocking gloom among local governments, private firms, and households. The problem is not cyclical, a residue of the COVID-19 pandemic or property slump, but structural.
Years of reliance on selling land to raise funds have left localities fiscally depleted, constraining their capacity for social spending. The private sector, despite rhetorical assurances, still faces regulatory ambiguity and has a waning appetite for risk, while households remain wary amid demographic headwinds and eroding confidence in future income growth.
The essays’ final section acknowledges the demographic challenge but reframes it as opportunity. Rising demand for health care, elder care, and education, it argues, can serve as a new engine of inclusive growth. By expanding these sectors, the state aims to transform demographic pressure into what officials term “new quality productive forces.”
The potential of a more robust “care economy” capable of absorbing labor, fostering service sector innovation, and supporting domestic consumption is real. Yet what remains unresolved and unaddressed in Zhong Caiwen’s technocratic optimism is the central dilemma confronting China’s transition. The country’s past success was built on the very mechanisms—state coordination, administrative mobilization, and policy discipline—that now risk constraining its next stage of growth.
The Zhong Caiwen essays are right to underscore resilience, but genuine resilience entails adaptation, not just central control. It requires tolerating uncertainty, distributing authority, and rebuilding trust among the state, the market, and society.
The road ahead will involve painful trade-offs, between growth and redistribution, central direction and local autonomy, short-term certainty and long-term dynamism. Whether China can navigate these trade-offs will determine not only the trajectory of its modernization but also whether its model can continue to renew itself.