Thanks for the citation to Gordon Chang. Although not specifically familiar with this article, I have been following the situation rather closely and have come to roughly the same conclusion as the author expressed in this vanity:
Black Swan
http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/2818760/posts
It includes these paragraphs:
“Daily we read of a rising tide of unrest in China with literally dozens of riots occurring somewhere every day over grievances which are papered over by a government induced real estate bubble. A government of elites has contrived to stay a half jump ahead of insurrection by raping the environment, inflating the economy, and generating a mercantilist expansion. The entire edifice is without honest transparency so that the central planners do not even know, and certainly cannot trust, the reported data upon which they must rely to shape the economy. They cannot know so they cannot be wise, even if such a thing were possible. One false step and the edifice implodes, yet every day the Chinese elites must take portentous decisions or be swamped by a demographic tsunami. As sure as human nature, wise men must eventually misstep and the Chinese economy must eventually come to its reckoning. When?
We commonly think of the Chinese economy as vibrant but actually it survived the crash of 2008 by massively inflating. It had to somehow cope with its teeming hundreds of millions of jobless. Although the resulting inflation was masked by its exports which created a positive trade balance, the problem had to be dealt with so the elites tried to tamper down inflation by belt-tightening. If they under shoot they will fail to control inflation and the real estate bubble will only inflate more. If they over shoot they will burst the bubble and crash the economy. Lately, it appears they have reversed course fearing that they have tightened too much.
To say that American conservatives are skeptical of the ability of elites to manage the world’s second-largest economy from the top downward is to belabor the obvious. But even if nine old men sitting in a room are wise enough to weave the Chinese economy through the thickets without a single misstep, the fate of China is not entirely in their own hands. China is utterly dependent on its markets in Europe and America because its own domestic economy is nowhere near the size which can sustain the country. “
ping for later reading. Thank you.