By shifting attention from commonly used GDP data to consumption data, Wang presents a fresh picture of China's four decades of high-velocity economic growth. When Chinese leaders began to usher in reforms in the late 1970s, the average person ate 20 pounds of meat per year. Now, the average person eats closer to 100 pounds of meat per year and obesity is a growing problem. Before the reforms, many Chinese people bought one set of new clothes and shoes per year; the country now tops the world market for luxury fashion. Wang traces similar changes in housing, furniture, home appliances, transportation, overseas travel, computers, and phones. This world-beating record, which represented the emergence of an enormous new middle class, owed much to the cheap labor of workers from the countryside who were often denied legal urban residence in China's household registration system. They served as inexpensive labor in farming, manufacturing, construction, and gig work, a capable and talented underclass made in large part by public health and primary education programs put in place well before economic reforms. Wang says the rate of change in lifestyles is now slowing because of the dwindling reserve of rural labor and a less favorable international environment. But tightened political control could, he warns, "once again send China down a road of economic stagnation and social suffocation."