Cover Story

How we chose this week’s images

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We have two covers this week: one on the worst start to a British government in memory and the other on our portrait of the world’s most powerful man, China’s president, Xi Jinping.

The 25-minute statement that Kwasi Kwarteng, Britain’s new chancellor of the exchequer, gave on September 23rd was meant to usher in an era of economic growth. Instead it triggered a crisis. As investors took fright, gilt yields surged, prompting the Bank of England to say on September 28th that it was ready to buy unlimited quantities of long-dated bonds in order to restore order to financial markets. Earlier, the pound had crashed to its lowest level ever against the dollar. The job of the cover was to make sense of it all.

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One impulse was to portray the vertiginous realisation that Britain was suffering a catastrophic loss of confidence in financial markets. The pound-coin meteors raining out of the heavens seemed apt in a week when NASA had crashed a probe into an asteroid called Dimorphos in order to alter its course.

Another impulse was to convey the recklessness of the gamble by Mr Kwarteng and the prime minister, Liz Truss. In a losing spin, the pound has dropped out of the slot machine. It’s fun, but a broken one-armed bandit hardly captures the gravity of Britain’s predicament.

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has more punch. Ms Truss and Mr Kwarteng are right to want to boost Britain’s anaemic rate of growth. But by rolling these dice Ms Truss could flatten her government. Cutting taxes was supposed to boost the economy. Instead the weaker pound is causing higher imported inflation, eroding real incomes. And interest-rate rises will add to the government’s own interest payments and harm people with mortgages.

Yet, even the giant dice are too kind. Only three weeks into the Truss premiership, her growth agenda may already be damaged beyond repair.

Sterling as a stick of dynamite is closer to the mark. Something bad is about to happen and the fuse did not light itself. The reaction to the budget means that it will hurt growth, not boost it. Tory MPs may well pocket the tax cuts and reject the reforms that might one day help pay for them. To regain market confidence, Ms Truss will have to reverse some tax cuts or slash public spending. The dynamite says that something is going to blow, either in the markets or in Number 10 Downing Street.

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That may yet happen. However, despite talk of another Conservative leadership contest, booting out Ms Truss so soon would seem ridiculous rather than ruthless. And Mr Kwarteng’s budget is unlikely to lead to a balance-of-payments crisis. Britain has a flexible exchange rate, it has minimal debt denominated in foreign currencies and its central bank is independent from the government.

More likely, therefore, the Truss government will be becalmed, its authority destroyed, its popularity damaged beyond hope, its dreams of radical reforms sunk far beyond reach.

China’s president, Xi Jinping, has amassed more power and wielded it more ruthlessly than any Chinese leader since Mao Zedong. As his dominance has grown, so has China’s ambition. At the party’s five-yearly congress, starting on October 16th, he will almost certainly be given another term as supreme leader, possibly setting him up as ruler for life.

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Because understanding Mr Xi has never been more important, The Economist has spent nine months interviewing dozens of people who have studied him up close and from afar. The result is this week’s briefing and our new eight-part podcast series, “The Prince”. One way of showing that was to put Mr Xi under the spotlight.

But it was better to adapt the graphic from the podcast. The title is a play on words. In China, Mr Xi is known (in whispers) as a taizi, or princeling. The term is most commonly applied to the offspring of leaders, especially the children of Communist China’s founders. Among the first 600 or so promising young officials identified by the Young Cadres Bureau in the early 1980s, about 5% were princelings. In the Politburo Standing Committee that Mr Xi took charge of in 2012, the majority were.

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“The Prince” is also the title of Niccolo Machiavelli’s work on how to be a ruler. As Machiavelli wrote, some 500 years ago, “Hereditary states…are maintained with far less difficulty than new states, since all that is required is that the Prince shall not depart from the usages of his ancestors.” Mr Xi may disagree with how easy that makes it sound, but the Chinese president clearly believes that preserving the party’s traditional ideological rhetoric is vital for keeping its 97m members in lockstep and himself in charge.

The contest between China and the West is, above all, one between competing philosophies. Western governments believe success comes from letting people choose their own destiny. China’s rulers believe that individuals must sacrifice their liberties, privacy and dignity for the greater good—as defined by the party. Mr Xi espouses a maximalist version of this. In “The Prince” we set out to explain why.