Posted on 05/30/2020 8:15:19 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Xi Jinping, during his appearance at the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference in Beijing on Saturday, talked about analyzing the Chinese economy from a “dialectical and long-term perspective.”
Should we be surprised that the Chinese leader is resorting to ideological circumlocutions when his economy is contracting and he knows he can’t rescue it soon?
The official National Bureau of Statistics reported that gross domestic product contracted 6.8 percent year-on-year during the first quarter of this year, the first announced decline since Beijing began issuing quarterly GDP statistics in 1992. Many assessments, including the widely followed China Beige Book, pegged the contraction at about 10 percent.
There has been a recovery this quarter, but it is hard to figure out the extent of the upturn. “It’s the worst information flow in my experience, which means since the 1980s,” Anne Stevenson-Yang of J Capital Research told me.
Workers have returned to job sites, but it appears the uptick has not been enough to move the country into positive territory. In general, factories have been ready to fill orders, but orders, especially from offshore buyers, are scare. The coronavirus pandemic has flattened China’s biggest export markets, those in Europe and North America. UBS, the Swiss banking giant, expects Q2 growth to remain negative.
The full-year does not look much better. The normally China-bullish International Monetary Fund forecasts the Chinese economy to grow only 1.2 percent this year. Private analysts believe growth will range between 1.5 percent and 2.5 percent. For last year, Beijing reported the economy grew 6.1 percent.
It is evident that China will not have, as analysts had once predicted, a V-shaped recovery. An L-shaped one—a long-drawn-out climb out of a hole—is more like it.
Even Chinese officials do not appear confident.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalinterest.org ...
Dialectical as in "we'd love to hear your POV so we can ignore it."
If you think the USA is in deep debt, get a load of China.
China, after years of heavy stimulus spending, has far less capacity to take on indebtedness. According to the Institute of International Finance, China’s debt-to-GDP ratio increased by 11 percentage points in 2019—and by a stunning seven points last quarter alone. It is now pegged at 317 percent.
There are reasons to believe that ratio is, in reality, far higher. Not all categories of debt are included in these calculations, the country’s reported GDP looks exaggerated, and the excess of the liabilities of China’s financial institutions over assets should be added to the ratio. The ratio looks understated even if central government assets were somehow factored in.
The military is getting an outsized portion of the central government’s budget. In short, spending on the world’s biggest military will burden the world’s second-largest economy.
Xi’s Belt & Road initiative will come due in coming months, and some borrowers, with economies hit hard by COVID-19, cannot repay. Beijing has extended infrastructure loans to 126 countries, and in recent years has lent an astounding $520 billion to the developing world. Much of the lending is imprudent. China’s loans to Djibouti, for instance, equal 80 percent of the African country’s GDP.
To make matters worse, factories are leaving Chinese soil, partially to avoid geopolitical friction and partially in response to commercial factors. China is bleeding manufacturing, and the hemorrhaging will continue especially when the Trump administration provides financial incentives for relocation.
CHYna is azzhole.
The Trump administration should openly encourage a change in China’s leadership. Xi Jinping is in a very weak position within China, and the world; but he just might not want to accept it, yet.
“China’s Economy Is In Deep Trouble” and so is ours! Our politicians have all but outlawed manufacturing in the USA. They have done so with the full cooperation of the voters, by creating agencies and laws such as EPA, EEOC, OSHA, IRS, the list goes on and on. Add to that democrat trial lawyers who are essentially ‘highway men’. Until this is corrected the best we can hope for is a lowered standard of living.
A war would stimulate their economy.
Won’t be long now.
So, expect some sort of armed conflict sooner rather than later. They will have to move up the time table to keep in power.
Slow growth vs. absolute decline here and in most of the rest of the world.
We need to get out of China totally.
The CCPs original target was to kick things off sometime in 2018 or 19. I think Trump threw a wrench into that.
The developing nations that got sucked in to taking loans from China should immediately disavow them as a partial penalty for spreading the Wuhan virus to their countries.
They should also kick the Chinese out of their countries.
We know and they know we know that they hit the world with a germ warfare weapon so China would not be the only country hit by the virus. This gives Trump huge leverage which he will use despite the rats trying to help them. The ChiComs are pinning their hopes on avoiding paying the price by helping the rats in November. If the rats cheat enough to get Trump out China will get away with all of it.
Hey, I know how that feels and I feel your pain. I really do.
Hegelian dialectics.
Been down this path.
Doesn’t end well.
Had heard another china expert a few weeks ago state that China will eventually turn inward again in an attempt for the CCP to maintain their grip on power as they have done in the past with other regimes.
This is why the chi-coms are on a war footing. There’s only two ways or making money, earn it or steal it. Production or conquest.
Conquest by production.
When that doesn’t work,
Conquest by any means.
Ummm... duh.
>>Xi Jinping is in a very weak position within China, and the world;<<
You got another Tianamin Square coming if you believe that.
So, what does history say, as a repair for a country’s tanked economy?
They can either crumble, or do the one thing, war.
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