For at least a generation, China's "economic miracle" allowed its people to look at Americans not as inhabitants of a richer world, but as potential peers. But now the two societies are peers in a different sense, because the Chinese are increasingly suffering the same rude awakening that Americans did when their own miracle ended.
CHICAGO—For most of the past four decades, China’s direction of travel was clear: everything was moving forward. The country’s per capita GDP was barely $300 at the start of the 1990s. But its cities would soon fill with skyscrapers, highways, and subways. Families that once worried about having enough food would buy apartments, cars, and smartphones. Children would go to universities their parents could scarcely have imagined attending. In the space of a generation, China joined the World Trade Organization, hosted the Olympics, built the world’s largest high-speed rail network, and became a central engine of the global economy.