中国正在发生一件有趣的现象：那些受过高等教育却身心俱疲的年轻人，开始阅读毛泽东早期的著作。他们研读这位新中国缔造者的文字，并非出于怀旧之情，而类似于早年美国一代人阅读斯图兹·特克尔作品的心态——将其视为能解释社会体制为何会压榨普通人的思想源泉。
Something curious is happening in China. Young people, college-educated and burned out, are picking up Mao Zedong’s early writings. They’re reading the founding father of the People’s Republic not as nostalgia, but the way an earlier American generation might have read Studs Terkel: as someone who gave language to why the system grinds people down.
几十年来，中国政府与民众之间存在着一种默契：努力工作、购买房产、在经济阶梯上向上攀爬且远离政治。然而如今，对于数以千万计的中国年轻人而言，这一契约已然失效。房价已跌至低于父母当年的购入价，即便拼命工作也难以获得足以支付房租的收入。正是在这样的背景下，2026年的中国年轻人开始借助毛泽东关于权贵阶层如何剥削劳动大众的论述，来寻求对自身处境的理解。这一现象折射出中国延续数十年的经济契约已然瓦解。
For decades, the Chinese state has had a deal with the people. Work hard, buy an apartment, climb the economic ladder and stay out of politics. Now, for tens of millions of young Chinese, that deal is off. The apartments are worth less than their parents paid. The ladder leads to a grueling work schedule and a work title that doesn’t cover rent. That’s the backdrop against which young Chinese today reach for Mao’s thoughts on how the powerful exploit the working class, using them to make sense of their lives in 2026. The phenomenon speaks to how much the country’s decadeslong economic bargain has broken.
究竟是什么发生了断裂？这正是国际货币基金组织亚洲事务负责人克里希纳·斯里尼瓦桑参与撰写的新书《探索中国经济增长新模式》所探讨的核心问题。我在该书上月发布前与他进行了交谈，他的判断直截了当：中国的增长模式“基本上已走到尽头”。
But what actually broke? That’s the question at the center of a new International Monetary Fund book, “Toward a New Economic Growth Model for China,” co-written by Krishna Srinivasan, the fund’s top Asia official. I spoke with him ahead of the book’s launch last month, and his diagnosis is blunt: China’s growth model has “largely run its course.”