China is at the point where a social safety net is needed to ensure long term prosperity, and concentrating on an export first model isn't going to cut it long term, because high value industries are heavily automated and skilled, and simply don't demand or need that many employees.
China has reached a point where the mean years of education amongst working age people (~8 years) has caught up with countries that used to be much richer than China 15 years ago like Brazil, Thailand, Turkiye, and Malaysia and it's mean life expectancy has outpaced all those countries except Turkiye and Thailand, which it is for all intents and purposes tied [0]. This is a MASSIVE win for global poverty eradication.
Yet the median age is significantly higher than all of them except Thailand [1], and median disposable household income remains around $400/mo [2] - lower than Thailand [3], Malaysia [4], or Türkiye's [5] despite having a GDP per capita (~13.3k in 2024) that is comparable to the latter 2 and above Thailand's.
Now is the time for China to expand its welfare system in order to make that leap into being a truly developed country, just like South Korea did in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Expanding the welfare state would help hundreds of millions of Chinese gain the ability to purchase higher value goods thus reducing the specter of "overproduction" leading to the current global trade war, while truly ensuring common prosperity.
Otherwise, it will flounder like Malaysia and Thailand did, both of which used to be South Korea's peer until the Asian Financial Crisis, or Turkiye after it's peak in 2014.
People mention "course correction" but what course correction can you do when disdain for a welfare system is so engrained in the upper echelons of leadership.
This is not a statement on the "collapse of China" (that's dumb), but if this problem around domestic consumption and a lack of a safety net is not nipped in the bud in the next 3-5 years, it will be much harder for China to take full advantage of the capabilities it has and ensure common prosperity.
[0] - https://globaldatalab.org/shdi/table/2022/lifexp+msch/BRA+CH...
[1] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/median-age?tab=discrete-b...
[2] - https://www.stats.gov.cn/english/PressRelease/202501/t202501...
[3] - https://www.nso.go.th/nsoweb/storage/survey_detail/2023/2023...
[4] - https://ekonomi.gov.my/sites/default/files/2023-12/Jadual4-P...
[5] - https://data.tuik.gov.tr/Bulten/Index?p=Gelir-Dagilimi-Istat...