U.S. President Joe Biden on Thursday called China a "ticking time bomb" because of its economic challenges and said the country was in trouble because of weak growth.
I love how some of the opening lines talks about interviewing a single Chinese person failing to run a business
One entrepreneur interviewed by The Wall Street Journal said that one of his businesses, a distributor for LED screens based in Shenzhen, is suffering from widening losses as overseas orders dry up, leading him to slash prices to compete for domestic clients. Having laid off more than 50 out of 120 staff since 2022, he said he is contemplating whether to shut the business this year.
Export decrese is in line with almost every other east asian country and its very much so a "western economies go into recession and import less" problem. Groth slowing to ~5% is in line with what everyone is expected and China doesnt sweat too much about it. Its pretty solid especially since its higher quality. Deflation is only a problem if it persists for a long time and if it actualy spans in various types of commodities. If you exclude energy and housing everything else shows small inflation in China still and the real estate sector is going through tough but needed restructuring and regulation periods since last year. Deflation introduced from that part of the economy is more or less a by product of them deleveraging the sector and bursting some bubbles
tldr chinas quarterly growth has slowed and liberal economists are claiming china's miracle is over. private sector investment has shrank 0.2% for the first time since data collection in 2005 but investment by state firms has expanded 8.1% in the same period. there's also a current global manufacturing recession. doesnt mean "its over" or whatever tf they're saying but interesting to note.
im not an expert in political economy, but if you read the article he goes into a lot of specific reasons why china is still in a great position in regards to the future, although it will take responsible leadership that pushes back against mainstream neoclassical economics.
Neoliberalism has been a failure for the actual population. It's decoupled economic growth from improved quality of life. Meanwhile, social democracies in Europe are showing that other models are practical and viable.
Yeah, "countries" the size of an American suburb don't matter. Euros are always like "but what about shitsteinburg, a country with a proud national tradition and a population of 37!" Nobody cares.
neoliberalism is a function of capitalism's contradiction of requiring constant exponential growth. in an infinite timeline neoliberalism will sadly completely consume any semblance of "social democracy", and you can already see even the classic european social democracies are beginning to eat away at and privatize their welfare states.
other people are also pointing out unequal exchange, which is a critical concept to factor into the equation when trying to understand where the wealth of the european social democracies come from.