Lily Ye shelters in a doorway near the Hermès store in Ginza and grumbles about being a stranded asset. Since the pandemic stopped Chinese tourists arriving in their millions for duty-free shopping, there has not been too much for a Tokyo-based, Mandarin-speaking luxury goods sales specialist to do.

The narrow streets around her, on a rainy Friday afternoon, are a study in sumptuous desolation. Ginza has its domestic customers, of course, but feels ever more like a cluster of the world’s highest-end brands readied for a still unscheduled future stampede of Chinese consumers. Among them, when they come, will be the emergent “alpha female” shopper whom even Xi Jinping might think twice before vexing. 

The question, though, is whether China’s ever more strident rhetoric of “common prosperity” and the Communist party’s apparent ease with untrailed regulatory change has put Xi on a collision course with luxury goods and those who most crave them.