China's growth spreads inland - Growth spreads inland.

The article examines how China's growth is expanding inland. China is indeed getting more unequal as it develops, and public order is a genuine problem. Two aspects of that are a product of the extraordinary level of mobility that the Chinese workforce has exhibited over the past two decades--the more remarkable since government policy has often attempted to restrict people's freedom to move. One kind has been from interior to coast, so that the privileged growth seen there is spreading its benefits more widely than might at first appear. A second kind, visible across the whole country, has been what may rank as the most rapid rate of urbanisation ever recorded. The creation of a successful integrated free-trade area will need co-operation between bureaucracy and enterprise. As prosperity spreads, and more Chinese people are able to start affording luxuries, China's domestic economy is starting to become a powerful engine of growth in its own right, just as happened earlier in Japan and, indeed, in America before that.