For decades, China’s political economy has evaded the neat categorisations of Left and Right. What do you call a vertiginously consumerist society led by a Communist Party? A dragon with a forked tongue that speaks in both the 5-year plan idiom of the apparatchik – “The implementation plans must be guided by Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism for a New Era, and thoroughly implement the spirit of the Third Plenary Session of the 20th Central Committee”– and the man-bunned, hipster argot of the barista – sea salt, caramel, oat milk latte.On many parameters China is today the best place in the world to be a consumer. You can have a single Flat White delivered to your home at 11pm for a price that can be cheaper than an in-store order. Get a full body massage at midnight. Find a car to zip you around the city with scarcely any wait time. Pay for everything with a casual wave of the mobile phone.But this erstwhile ‘worker’s paradise’ can also be hell for a worker. The country is already notorious for its 9-9-6 work culture – 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week. But my poor foot massage guy, Mr Xu, works from 9am to 12am, 7 days a week.Learning this has totally spoiled my enjoyment of the service. I now must keep myself from jumping out of the chair and offering Mr Xu a massage instead of getting one from him. Yet, I return. Repeatedly. It’s more helpful to him that I do so, rather than taking my custom elsewhere.And despite the insane working hours, my masseur is bullish about his nation’s future. He spends almost equal time telling me how alarmingly stiff my shoulder muscles are and regaling me with stories of how his village in Henan province has been transformed over the last 10 years. The countryside roads are great, he says. And so many new entertainment options. There are restaurants that rival a city’s offerings. Even karaoke.I ask about health insurance – because I am now almost 50, an age where things like health care seem more important than karaoke. He tells me that last year village residents were reimbursed by the government for health costs to the tune of about 3,000RMB.In fact, less than 4% of China’s population has no health insurance at all. And the average life expectancy here is 78.02 years, just a hair’s breath lower than that of the United States (78.4). (In India the equivalent is 72. In Spain, 84). The parks are full of senior citizens slapping their thighs – to get the qi flowing and improve circulation. Cities are markedly greener than a decade ago. Air pollution is greatly reduced. Ditto noise pollution, thanks to the rapid rise in electric vehicles.Two weeks ago, I had lunch with a young Chinese academic who is making ripples in the usually pursed-lip, foreign policy analytical space. The academic told me how he grew up in a rural backwater. When he first came to Beijing in the early 2000s, he took a deep breath.“I just loved the smog,” he deadpanned. “To me, the smoke and pollution was the smell of development. Growth.” Clean countryside air equated poverty, city smokestacks, opportunity. Fifteen years on, Beijing’s air can, on occasion, be even cleaner than in the European countryside. “Pollute first and grow, so you can then clean the environment. It is the logical way,” the scholar said. The cart cannot come before the horse.For the quarter of a century that I have been following China, the prevailing dogma has not been Marxism but economic growth. Growth has been projected, accepted and to a large extent, experienced as a universal panacea for all things under heaven, from political legitimacy, international clout, cultural respect, domestic stability, environmental protection, improved health and technological innovation.But this does not mean that Marxism has been jettisoned. Rather it’s been domesticated – given its famed Chinese characteristics. In essence, Marxism is an ideology where the economic undergirds the superstructure of society. The material shapes the spiritual, emotional and intellectual. And this privileging of the economic remains the driving force behind contemporary China’s policies.Human rights are primarily framed as economic rights. It is a worldview where the curtailment of the freedoms of expression, thought and belief are justified on the basis that these are, or can be, antithetical to growth. And growth always comes first. As a former colleague at a Chinese university that I taught in many moons ago, once put it, “The idea is that you must shut up to get rich.”The urge to make, and save, money is the beating heart of China. It is as palpable in the hum of factories, as in the frantic dashing about of delivery personnel on city roads. My manicurist is from Heilongjiang province in the northeast. She’s 40 years old, the mother of three children. Her youngest, a girl, is only four. They live with her parents back in the village.“Don’t you miss them?” I asked as she moved my right hand under a UV lamp to dry the varnish. She shrugged. “Of course. But you can’t look after children if you’re working. And you must work if you have children. They’re expensive.” Working hours at the nail salon are 10 am to 9pm, seven days a week. “How could I have my kids with me here?” she said, matter-of-factly.Since the 1980s, waves of migrant workers from the countryside have broken upon the shores of China’s cities, to work in factories and construction sites, leaving behind their children to be brought up by grandparents or family friends. One in 14 of these “Left Behind Children” live alone.Urbanites, on the other hand, are increasingly choosing not to have children at all. This, despite the easing of the One Child Policy, that used to limit Chinese families to a single child. In August, the authorities announced their latest push to boost flagging birth rates. Parents will now get an annual subsidy of 3,600 yuan ($500) for every child until age three, effective retroactively from January 1.But my 30-year-old Chinese teacher is unimpressed. She will emphatically not be having a baby. “Who can afford it?” she asked before launching into mathematical calculations about how much it costs to educate a child in China. In fact, according to a recent study by the Beijing-based YuWa Population Research Institute, raising a child in China to the age of 18 costs an average of 538,000 yuan ($75,000), more than six times the country’s GDP per capita.“But isn’t it sad?” I responded. My limited Chinese did not permit me fuller expression. I wanted to say – isn’t it tragic, this reduction of the almost sensual-spiritual pleasure of motherhood to the economic calculus of school fees, plus extracurricular activities? Isn’t it appalling that a well-educated, urban, middle-class individual in a country that is increasingly recognised as a superpower sees children so coldly in terms of a cost benefit analysis? What about love? What about snuggles? What about the tingling feeling of sleeping cheek to puffy cheek with someone that has emerged from within you? But all I could say was, “But, isn’t it sad?”My teacher looked non plussed for a second and then said, “Yes, I suppose its boring when you finish work and go back home and there’s not much to do.”Which is pretty much the same thing that our DiDi (Chinese Uber) driver said last week as she drove my husband and me back home. Her day job was at a pharmaceutical company, but she was bored after getting off work. Hence her decision to begin moonlighting as a driver. “Why not earn some extra cash instead of getting bored doing nothing at home?” she chuckled.In China, the legacy of Marxism is evident in this overweening emphasis on the material over – and often to the detriment of – the emotional, intellectual and spiritual. The sphere where one is freest – despite the work hours, the diminishing return on working longer hours, and an economic slowdown – is that of work. You have more freedom to make money than to practice religion or protest policy or read ‘unsuitable’ books or watch Netflix.The balance between Ying and Yang may be a fundamental concept in traditional Chinese philosophy, but balance is not something that Marxism is big on. And this lack of balance, work-life or material-emotional, is a lingering legacy of China’s Communist revolution in the “New Era.”