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Hello and welcome to Chinese Whispers with me, Cindy Yu.

Every episode, I'll be talking to journalists, experts,

and long-time China watches about the latest in Chinese politics, society and more.

There'll be a smattering of history to catch you up on the background knowledge and some

context as well. How do the Chinese see these issues? When Dao-Pin's economic reforms began in China after Mao's death, he talked about letting some people get rich first.

That was the idea of his trickle-down economics.

But today, Xi Jinping is talking about something called common prosperity, rather than prosperity just for the few.

It's the slogan he's used a number of times now since last year,

and we're starting to see what exactly it entails,

although there are still a lot of question marks over it.

Joining me to discuss what common prosperity might mean for the near future of Chinese growth

is George Magnus, an economist and associate at the China Centre in Oxford,

and author of Red Flags,

Why Seas China is in jeopardy. So, George, welcome to the podcast, welcome back, I should say.

To start with, can you explain a little bit about what the ideal blueprint that Xi Jinping is going

for in his most perfect version of Common Prosper prosperity, at least as far as we know.

Common prosperity is designed as a slogan principally to focus attention on inequality.

I mean, it's not a new concept. We can probably date it back to around 1953 in the Mao era,

and it resurfaced again under Deng Xiaoping.

Obviously, for each of the two Chinese leaders historically, it represented something a little bit different. For Sishing Ping, it kind of represents something different again. But just to emphasize,

it's not a new kind of concept for the party, and it is in current

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