LAST year Xi Jinping, China’s leader, paid a visit to Heilongjiang in the country’s north-east. Part of China’s industrial rust belt, the province exemplifies the problems besetting China’s economy. Its birth rate is the lowest in the country. House prices in its biggest city are falling. The province’s GDP grew by only 2.6 per cent in 2023. Worse, its nominal GDP, before adjusting for inflation, barely grew at all, suggesting it is in the grip of deep deflation.

Never fear: Xi has a plan. On his visit, he urged his provincial audience to cultivate “new productive forces”. That phrase has since appeared scores of times in state newspapers and at official gatherings. It was highlighted in last month’s “two sessions”, annual meetings of China’s rubber-stamp parliament and its advisory body.

In the preface of a new book on the subject, Wang Xianqing of Peking University likens the term to “reform and opening up”, the formula that encapsulated China’s embrace of market forces after 1978. Those words “shine” even today, he wrote, implying that “new productive forces” will have similar staying power.