The median age of the American population is 37. This means that half of the population is under that age. These young Americans have grown up with endless foreign wars and witnessed one major recession. The median age of China’s population is also 37, but these young Chinese have never seen anything but a booming economy and good times. This half of China’s population was entirely born after 1980, during the period of sustained growth you see in the charts above.

Thanks to government stimulus and the momentum of the previous 30 years of growth, the average Chinese person barely felt the 2009 Global Financial Crisis. In fact, that was the year when Chinese government officials and academics began publicly expressing doubts about the American and Western economic and political systems. As one economist put it:

China’s ability to bounce back quickly from the impact of the crisis has cemented China as a leading actor in attempts to reform global economic governance, and has led many to rethink the efficacy of strong state-led developmental strategies vis-à-vis (neo)liberal alternatives.

In other words, many people saw 2009 as proof that the Party is doing an excellent job with the economy. Despite rampant inequality, survey after survey shows that Chinese people are on the whole optimistic about the future, and feel that their standard of living is improving. Two recent examples:

Nearly 9 in 10 Chinese people believe their country is “on the right track,” making China the most optimistic country in the world, according to a 2017 Ipsos survey. In comparison, only 43 percent of Americans had a positive view of their country’s direction.

making China the most optimistic country in the world, according to a 2017 Ipsos survey. In comparison, only 43 percent of Americans had a positive view of their country’s direction. Chinese teenagers are particularly optimistic, according to another Ipsos survey in 2018, with 94 percent of Chinese aged 12–15 saying they were optimistic about their country’s future, compared with 64 percent of their American peers.

One important source of all these happy feelings is that the Chinese government engineered an urban middle class whose prosperity is connected to political stability. The economist Andrew Batson calls it “one of the most important and least understood events in its modern economic history.” This is what happened:

In the 1990s, as economic reforms were really taking hold, the government allowed some state-owned firms to go out of business or to lay off large numbers of workers. These were people who thought they had a job for life that included housing and healthcare. So state-owned firms — even the ones that were not going out of business or sacking large numbers of staff — gave their employees apartments either for free or at very low prices. Batson, the economist, says the resulting “launch of a private housing market…created the major source of private household wealth” in China.

What will happen if there is a major recession? Who knows. Whereas many Chinese people older than 50 have memories of being hungry as children, anyone younger than that has only known a booming economy.