Xi Jinping is the paramount leader of China and of the Chinese Communist Party, the CCP. Xi is all-powerful. Xi is incapable of admitting fallibility. That failing undermines economic growth. The fractures in the Chinese economy are becoming wide and obvious, and China is facing an economic earthquake.

Xi’s economic policies are failing. China is doomed to be permanently entwined in the middle-income trap, unable to embrace the policies of creative destruction necessary for a country to achieve the productivity levels of wealthy nations, such as the United States and Japan.