Gordon G. Chang
"Growing pains."
That's how Harvard scholar Keyu Jin describes the problems afflicting the world's second-largest economy. "China's economic woes," she writes in Nikkei Asia, "are less a sign of stagnation and more akin to growing pains—inevitable hurdles on the path of transformation."
Yes, every economy faces difficulties, especially developing ones. But China's are intractable. Because Xi Jinping is determined to take the country in an unsustainable direction, China is entering, as some call it, a "doom loop."
"China's economy is confronting a crisis unlike any it has experienced since it opened its economy to the world more than four decades ago," the New York Times reported in September.
Why is the crisis so severe? For starters, China is currently having its 2008 downturn.
In 2008, China's President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao decided they would not allow the economy to suffer, so they embarked on perhaps the biggest stimulus program in history.
The result was historic overbuilding, and the country now has too much of almost everything. For instance, He Keng, a former senior statistics official, in 2023 publicly revealed that China had enough vacant apartments to house the entire population of 1.4 billion people. He noted that some believed that empty homes could hold three billion.
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