Datong and Xiaokang

Abstract

In his epic three-hour-long speech to open the Nineteenth Party Congress on 18 October 2017, Xi Jinping emphasised the establishment of a comprehensive xiaokang shehui—which official translators rendered as ‘moderately prosperous society’—as the first of four strategies for the ‘new era of socialism with Chinese characteristics.’¹ He repeated the term xiaokang shehui 18 times during this exceptionally long speech, making it a goal for his tenure and almost synonymous with the rise of China. Still, the concept has been in use throughout China’s reform period and much earlier, as intellectuals have repeatedly raised it as a future step