Chinese President Xi Jinping’s first major reform plans a decade ago were also his boldest, envisaging a transition to a Western-style free market economy driven by services and consumption by 2020.

The 60-point agenda was meant to fix an obsolete growth model better suited to less developed countries - however, most of those reforms have gone nowhere leaving the economy largely reliant on older policies that have only added to China’s massive debt pile and industrial overcapacity.

The failure to restructure the world’s second-largest economy has raised critical questions about what comes next for China.

While many analysts see a slow drift towards Japan-style stagnation as the most likely outcome, there is also the prospect of a more severe crunch.

  • randon31415@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I’ve been hearing about ghost towns and the coming Chinese economic collapse now for ten years. It will probably happen after Trump is behind bars at this rate.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    BEIJING, Sept 4 (Reuters) - Chinese President Xi Jinping’s first major reform plans a decade ago were also his boldest, envisaging a transition to a Western-style free market economy driven by services and consumption by 2020.

    The 60-point agenda was meant to fix an obsolete growth model better suited to less developed countries - however, most of those reforms have gone nowhere leaving the economy largely reliant on older policies that have only added to China’s massive debt pile and industrial overcapacity.

    That has kept consumer demand weaker as a portion of GDP than in most other countries and concentrated job creation in the construction and industrial sectors, careers increasingly spurned by young university graduates.

    Logan Wright, a partner at Rhodium Group, says Beijing has to decide which portion of that debt to rescue, as the amount is too large to provide full guarantees of repayment, which the market currently regards as implicit.

    Alicia Garcia Herrero, chief economist for Asia Pacific at Natixis, expects there would be plenty of buyers if Beijing consolidates debt given limited investment alternatives.

    Those plans have barely been mentioned since 2015 when a capital outflows scare sent stocks and the yuan tumbling and engendered an official aversion to potentially disruptive reforms, analysts say.


    The original article contains 983 words, the summary contains 208 words. Saved 79%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • iain@feddit.nl
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    1 year ago

    China’s economic miracle? I don’t believe in miracles. I don’t believe articles that talk about miracles.

    China is both a dangerous enemy and they’re about to collapse. The enemy is both strong and weak. Umberto Eco called that one of the characteristics of fascism.

    • Sanctus@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Why does this have so many downvotes? We do sound like fascists talking about China like they are somehow both on the verge of collapse and our greatest threat. Yet they produce all our shit.

      • iain@feddit.nl
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        1 year ago

        I am not defending China, just pointing out a crappy argument.

        We’re becoming more and more fascist in the west, with politicians like Trump, DeSantis and so on. This article from Reuters is part of this shift to the right and that’s why I’m pointing it out. Fascism is a bigger risk to our way of life than China is.

    • ChicoSuave@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Umberto Eco’s list of fascist characteristics are applied to how they view themselves, not how others view them. Strength is dependent on many things to help maintain that strength and weakness is antithetical - a thing cannot be weak and strong by the same metric. You calling them both weak and strong is fascist, it isn’t true because you’re using different metrics to measure different parts of China.

      • iain@feddit.nl
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        1 year ago

        A thing can’t be weak and strong by the same metric, indeed. That’s why this article has to call China’s economical strength a miracle, as well as so weak it is about to collapse, otherwise the contradiction would be too obvious.

  • GodlessCommie@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    How many decades have passed where we’ve been told they are on the verge of collapse? It’s always right around the corner. This is Schrodinger’s China, simultaneously weak and strong.

    This is nothing more than red scare propaganda to diminish the achievements of a society outpacing the US

    • steltek@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Is this your first economic crisis or something? Do some search-replace work and this article looks like a copy-paste dupe from 2008. Their capitalist society is about to get a market correction as the bubble bursts. That’s all.

      The real propaganda at work here is that anything negative about China is automatically “red scare” and not just boring old “business news”.