With eighty million members and four billion dollars in foreign currency, the Party (i.e. the Communist Party of China) is the largest and richest political party on the face of the earth. Having founded the People's Republic of China in 1949, the cpc has already been in power for nearly seventy years, yet shows absolutely no signs of tiring of government. Quite the contrary. In his farewell speech as Party Secretary in October 2012, Hu Jintao said that the Party will never take ‘the wrong path of changing its banner’. For those who failed to understand this metaphor, Hu made his meaning crystal clear: ‘We will never copy a western political system.’ Xi Jinping is equally explicit in his aversion towards Western democracy, and asserts that ‘Chinese democracy’ means improving its ‘consultative democracy’, not abolishing the oneparty state. Aside from these ideological nuances, the core question is whether the political system is capable of solving the country's gigantic social and economic problems. Driven by state investment and exports, China has since the beginning of the 1990s realized average growth figures of 10 percent per annum: But the expiration date for that model is in sight. China is one of the most polluted countries in the world: According to a recent report from the World Health Organisation, air pollution alone is killing nearly three million people each year – and that is just one form of pollution claiming countless victims. The second, very visible effect of the economic boom is the growing gap between rich and poor. After the United States, China has the largest number of billionaires in the world, flying in private jets and buying châteaux in France. Its Wirtschaftswunder has a flip side, though.