Xi Jinping is using his growing authority to amass even more

IDEOLOGICAL flexibility has long been critical to success in China. The office of a state-owned company in Wuhan, a big central city, testifies to its enduring importance. On the bookshelf behind a senior manager’s desk are a few red-bound Communist Party tracts, including a collection of speeches from a recent meeting where “Xi Jinping Thought” was written into the constitution. Stacked alongside these is literature of a different breed: two analyses of blockchains, a primer on the “industrial revolution 4.0” and a recently published guide to life and business by Ray Dalio, an American hedge-fund billionaire.