After the global financial crisis of 2007-09, economists quickly understood that the world economy would never be the same again. Although it would get past the disaster, it would recover to a “new normal”, rather than the pre-crisis status quo. A few years later the phrase was also adopted by China’s leaders. They used it to describe the country’s shift away from breakneck growth, cheap labour and monstrous trade surpluses. These changes represented a necessary evolution in China’s economy, they argued, which should be accepted, not resisted too strenuously.
