Yet despite the long boom, most Chinese citizens remain fairly poor. Per-capita G.D.P. is about $7,000, and consumption makes up only 35 percent of the economy, thanks to the high levels of savings and corporate profits. So per-capita consumption — the amount of money the average person spends — is only about $2,500 a year. In the United States, by comparison, it is about $30,000. In Brazil, where per-capita G.D.P. is one and a half times that of China’s, consumption is more than two and a half times as high, or about $7,000.

Of course, anyone who has lived through the global bubble and bust of the last few years may wonder what’s so great about a consumer society. In the United States, the idea that we have reoriented our economy toward consumption and don’t make things anymore has become a standard lament, not a sign of progress. But China is a long way from consuming too much. Saying that China does not have a big-enough consumer economy is really another way of saying that not enough of its resources reach the broad mass of its people. If they had more resources, they would surely spend more. This is why the recent labor strikes, and the pay increases that followed, were so important. They were a sign that Chinese households might start to enjoy more of the fruits of the long boom.

In coming years, the pressure to raise wages will increase. The size of China’s labor force, relative to the rest of its population, will peak in the next few years, if it hasn’t already. The country is still a long way from facing labor shortages, but the flow of young workers from the countryside will slow. Companies will probably have to respond by raising wages of their existing workers or by moving inland, where wages are lower, and paying workers there what they once paid workers on the coast. Either way, the effect will be to raise the average wage nationwide. Foxconn, which employs 920,000 people making iPhones and other technology products, is opening new factories in Chongqing, a large city 1,000 miles inland.

Given that China is not exactly a free-market economy, the extent to which wages rise will depend in no small part on government policy. Party officials are themselves torn over what to do. One businessman told me he knew that most outsiders thought of China as a top-down, centralized country. “But China is a collection of special interests,” he said, “like the U.S.” Leaders understand that suppressing labor unrest may help economic growth in the short term by holding down wages and thus the price of exports. But many also know that economic discontent risks political instability of the kind that in the last century alone toppled an emperor and Chiang Kai-shek, led to the chaos of the Cultural Revolution and threatened the current regime in Tiananmen Square.

Yu finds the allocation of resources to be perhaps the most frustrating aspect of today’s economy. Even as companies and the largest cities are prospering, many parts of society are starved of resources. Last year, Yu’s wife spent part of the summer tutoring the daughter of the woman who cleans their building. The girl was moving from her hometown to live with her mother in Beijing and needed to learn English to keep up with her new classmates. The rural school she came from did not teach English. (Her family also had to pay tuition, because the hukou household-registration system denied them free education outside their home province.) In some rural areas, the teachers themselves have not graduated from high school. As part of a lecture he recently gave, Yu included some photographs among the usual economic charts and graphs. One showed students at their desks in a rural classroom, surrounded by muddy puddles on a dirt floor. Others showed the spectacular new Beijing Opera House, a bullet train and a series of gaudy provincial government buildings.

It is worth pausing for a minute on this contrast. In the big cities of the coast, the creation of a Chinese consumer society is proceeding apace. Sometimes, it can even seem a step ahead of the United States. On the tunnel walls between some stops of the Beijing subway, video advertisements move at the same speed as the train, vying for riders’ attention with televisions, also showing ads, inside the subway cars. Modern Chinese society hardly seems hostile to the idea of consumption. The problem is how little money so many people have.

Wuqi has been able to try a different economic model because it is neither too rich nor too poor. Located in Shaanxi Province, about a third of the way west from Beijing toward Tibet, it is too remote to be a factory boomtown. Indeed, it can feel more like part of China’s past than its future. The billboards lining the mountain roads into Wuqi display Communist Party sayings like “Support the military, and the military should love the people.” The older homes in the area are the same kind as those in which Mao and his comrades lived during their Shaanxi exile: mountainside caves, fronted by a stone archway and facade. But Wuqi also has oil. Feng, the party secretary, has decided to spend a large portion of the oil money on education.