Few Chinese leaders are as revered as Deng Xiaoping. His late-19'70s modernization drive led to an unrivaled run of high-speed growth. Chinese President Xi Jinping, who has big reform ambitions of his own, often evokes the memory of the paramount leader, who died in 1997. China's transformation from an agrarian backwater to a $9.2 trillion economy with globally competitive companies, including Xiaomi, Huawei, Baosteel, and Alibaba, has been remarkable. Years of politically driven investment with diminishing returns have led to too much debt and industrial overcapacity, as well as ghost cities with unfinished hotels and absurd ambitions. Unfortunately, research by Michael Pettis, finance professor at the Guanghua School of Management at Peking University, shows, every investment-led growth miracle in the last 100 years has broken down. Xi and Premier Li Keqiang are trying to avoid that fate by guiding China onto a more sustainable path that would bolster the role of consumer spending and shift the economy to a more services-oriented model.