Have we reached Peak China?

The world's second-biggest economy has long seemed set on an everupwards path. But amid a slowing economy and jobs market, the outlook may be changing for the country's people-and its leaders

- Amy Hawkins

Holding her newborn daughter, Lynne, 33, feels apprehensive about the future. Her elder son, though adorable, is already draining the family coffers and he hasn't even started school yet. His private kindergarten in Beijing costs 80,000 yuan ($11,000) a year. Extracurricular classes, including 10 hours a week of English, sports, painting and online tutorials, cost another 60,000 yuan. She already knows that his five-month-old sister won't get the same resources.

"I don't have the energy to jiwa again," she said, using a Mandarin term for helicopter parenting. She longs for her home town of Xingtai, a small city in Hebei province, where school fees are a fraction of what they are in Beijing, and where life is "peaceful and relaxed and happy".

"It's really hard in Beijing," she said.

Like tens of millions of other wealthy urbanites in China, Lynne has ridden the wave of an economic boom that has transformed China from a poor, largely rural country into the world's second-largest economy.

When Lynne was born in 1990, nearly 70% of China's population lived in extreme poverty, according to the World Bank. Now that share is virtually zero (although many people are still very poor).

When China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, western pundits predicted that greater economic engagement with the west would lead to political liberalisation, while in China, leaders promised the opposite: as long as ordinary Chinese stayed out of politics, the state would deliver riches.