Party Congress talk of income redistribution in the name of common prosperity makes many Americans nervous, especially those in need of investment advice. Redistribution after all is a defining characteristic of a socialist economy. It goes with state allocation, nationalisation, even the command-and-control model we associate with high Stalinism. So investors, hearing the rhetoric of the 20th CCP Congress, start wondering if this is the signal for an exit, or risk a haircut, or even expropriation, if they stay. Is this back to the 1950s? Hardly. We are now so used to small government, we no longer know how to read strong states that never quite took to the 1980s Thatcher-Reagan retreat of the state. Can we relearn to read between the lines? Fortunately Bill told us Bloomberg had turned to some leading Chinese economists, who canvassed various mechanisms available to the party-state, all of them familiar Economics 101 methods, even if in richer countries they are getting a bit dusty. Real estate taxes. capital gains should be taxed properly. a possible inheritance tax were named. Yet when you look at the policy proposals of these influential insiders, it becomes clearer they are not suggesting anything drastic, still less anything quick. Take Su Hainan, like many famous economists author of hundreds of papers, who is named as mooting a more effective capital gains tax. Su Hainan is a labor economist, so you might expect him to embrace redistribution that puts more money in consumer pockets, rewards factory workers and gig workers fairly, and fulfils the socialist goal of egalitarian redistribution. You might expect a director of the Labor and Wage Research Institute of the Ministry of Labor and Social Security and the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security to be a card-carrying Marxist. In reality Su Hainan hews closely to the official line, both in embracing vaguely egalitarian rhetoric, and in proposing quite modest actual policy shifts. In the Baike Baidu wiki sketch of Su Hainan’s long career, he trims his sails according to the prevailing wind, maybe not so surprising for a man with 40 years in official labor governance who is also director of the China Entrepreneurs Association , and Executive Director of the foreign investment in China Enterprise Association . How’s that for even-handedness? The accelerating financialization of the Chinese economy, in Su’s view “have also given the common people a lot of money. Some returns, but the accumulation of wealth too fast for a few people has also caused social discussion. This issue is to be resolved.” Similarly, on real estate speculation by owners of multiple properties: “Property income is an indispensable channel to increase residents' income.” He does advocate disciplining the more flagrant flaunting of obscene wealth, by more effective implementation of capital gains tax rules, which in practice are highly negotiable. If that is Marxism, it is of the Medici Marxist branch, whose motto “festina lente”, hasten slowly, nails it. Where Su Hainan excels it is in sympathising with the frustrated masses for whom trickle down never trickled down, and after 40 years of promises that never materialised, are fed up. Peng Zaizhou, the lone activist who unfurled protest banners contesting the platitudes of the 20th Congress is much closer to the pulse of the masses: “We are migrant workers from the countryside who have no social security. We are people on the bottom rung of the society who cannot afford medical treatment. We are jobless, drifting from one temp to another. We are college graduates with a degree but no job. We are employees of the extracurricular education sector whose livelihood was taken away by government order. We are the low-end population who have been cleared out of big cities. We are law-abiding small and micro business owners whose shops are shut down. We are service providers on the brink of bankruptcy. We are people who are either defaulting on our mortgage, or contemplating jumping to our deaths; we are either enslaved by a mortgage that depletes the savings of three generations, or families that dare not to have children. We are migrant workers in cities from the countryside, leaving our children behind. We are parents in provinces where the threshold for college admission is the highest. We are high schoolers who must separate from our parents and go back to our origin to take the college entrance exams. We are the chained women, trafficked and sold with no hope to ever gain freedom. We are defamed intellectuals and educators. We are native residents whose homes are expropriated by force. We are second-class citizens who buy cars or enroll children in school by lottery.” So when you ponder the impact of the 20th CCP Congress rhetoric on your portfolio, spare a thought for all those “low-end” folks despised and exploited by the powerful, who are yet again being explicitly fed the old line that the road to riches is hard work. There are genuine Marxists in China, who have actually read what Marx had to say about proletariats and exploitation. They aren’t to be found in the Labor and Social Security department, but on the fringes.