中国经济比西方更具韧性
2023-09-04 08:43阅读：
过去十年来，西方主流评论人士发出中国经济将会衰退的观点。然而，中国成功坚持下来。今年，西方对中国经济前景的悲观情绪达到新高度。那么，这一次来自西方经济学家的可怕预期会变成现实吗？
在某种程度上，中国目前的经济放缓不可避免。任何发展中的经济体都不可能持续维持非常高的增长率。即便如此，仍需要在更大的背景下来看待中国目前的经济问题。其实，尽管国际货币基金组织称中国的增长势头减弱，但它仍预测今年中国经济将增长5.2%，明年增长4.2%。此类数据真的能支撑所谓“消沉”“螺旋式下降”或一场“前所未有的危机”的言论吗？相反，这是发达国家政府甚至不再奢望的增长水平。
是的，中国确实正面临艰难经济时期。但对中国有利的是，中国远比许多其他工业化国家更有韧性。中国抵御风险的韧性不同于西方，这主要是因为中国拥有强大的生产能力。尽管西方正在渲染回流和去全球化等论调，但中国仍是毫无疑问的世界制造业超级大国。
过去十年来，中国的债务大幅增加，这是事实，但造成这点的原因正表明中国经济的相对韧性。美英等发达国家之所以负债是因为一直在补贴消费，这有助于维持现有经济活动水平，但几乎没有为未来留下任何遗产。相比之下，中国的债务主要来自为新建的现代基础设施提供融资，而这些基础设施为未来增长提供了坚实物质基础。
此外，令人惊讶的是，国际货币基金组织仍然期待中国保持其作为全球增长最大贡献者的角色。今年，中国对世界经济增长贡献将达到1/3。面对所有这些显示中国经济可持续的指标，许多西方评论人士为何还要对中国如此悲观？其实，西方精英对中国持双重看法，既将中国视为一个战略竞争对手，又认为中国经济陷入困境。尽管存在矛盾，但这两种看法都与西方十年来加大对中国的攻击力度有关。
从更广泛意义上说，对中国经济的消极看法与西方经济思
想中日益加剧的悲观情绪相一致。疫情后，随着能源短缺和俄乌冲突，西方比以往任何时候都更加陷入经济和政治泥潭。西方政府重新掌控发展并使之重回持续增长道路的前景非常渺茫。失去目标和信心的西方精英可能想从散布其最大的地缘政治对手即将崩溃中得到一些安慰。而这却凸显出他们的困惑、不思进取和无能，与中国的真实情况没有多少关系。
The fall of China? Don't bet on it
Gloomy predictions of China's imminent economic collapse say far
more about the West than they do about China.
PHIL MULLAN
Fifty years ago, some radical leftist groups were renowned for
always predicting the imminent collapse of Western capitalism. Yet
as is now clear, capitalism survived these cataclysmic auguries.
Over the past decade, mainstream commentators have been making
similar claims about the Chinese party-state economic system. Yet,
so far, China has also survived.
Talk of China being on the verge of financial and economic ruin was
once an idiosyncratic view. For instance, Gordon Chang’s The Coming
Collapse of China, published in 2001, predicted that China would
fall apart by 2011. At the end of 2011, Chang admitted in Foreign
Policy magazine that his prediction was wrong, but said it was off
by ‘only a year’, and that China’s collapse would definitely happen
in 2012. As a result, Chang made the magazine’s annual list of ‘10
worst predictions of the year’ twice in a row.
Throughout the 2010s, this trickle of foreboding turned into a
flood. George Magnus, an eminent Oxford-based economist, has been a
consistent China doomer. He opened the decade with his 2010 book,
Uprising: Will Emerging Markets Shape or Shake the World Economy?
One reviewer described it as ‘a useful corrective to some of the
more breathless and overenthusiastic tracts on China’s inevitable
path to world domination’. Then, in 2018, Magnus released Red
Flags: Why Xi’s China Is in Jeopardy, which was said to offer ‘a
penetrating account of the threats to China’s continued economic
rise’.
China’s uneven post-Covid recovery has brought Western gloom about
China’s economic prospects to new heights this year. Here’s a
flavour of some of the many recent downbeat headlines: ‘China
facing “downward spiral” as property crisis deepens’ (the
Telegraph); ‘China’s slumping economy signals the end of a
high-growth era’ ( City AM); and ‘China’s unprecedented economic
crisis worries the rest of the world’ ( Le Monde).
These stories draw on real economic problems. China slipped into
price deflation in July, as growth in retail sales and industrial
output slowed. And just this week, Country Garden, a major property
developer, missed payments on some of its debt. To cap all this
off, Beijing announced last month that it will stop publishing
youth-unemployment figures, after reporting record highs – a sign
that the authorities are keen to bury bad economic news.
So, might the dire expectations from Western economists finally
come true this time? Certainly, economic growth has slowed
substantially since those heady days during the 1990s and 2000s, of
growth rates of more than 10 per cent per annum. But since China
has survived all the previous portents of ruination, it would
probably be wise not to hold our breath.
The current slowdown is, to some extent, inevitable. No expanding
economy could sustain such high compound growth rates forever – at
least without some sort of slump. Still, China’s current economic
troubles need to be put into a wider context.
It is revealing to look at what Western experts were predicting
about Chinese growth 20 years ago. Dreaming With BRICs: The Path to
2050, released in 2003, was a highly celebrated piece of analysis
produced by Goldman Sachs. It shook up the complacent view, widely
held at the time, that the Western economies would forever dominate
the world. The study suggested that China would soon have a larger
economy than Germany and Japan, and it could overtake the United
States as the world’s No1 economy by about 2040. The Goldman Sachs
report acknowledged that these predictions were ‘startling’ and
‘dramatic’. Yet what is most striking from today’s vantage point is
that China’s actual growth rates have exceeded those optimistic
predictions. What’s more, Goldman Sachs predicted that Chinese
annual growth would slow to 4.6 per cent between 2020 and 2025, and
4.1 per cent between 2025 and 2030. Those projections are pretty
much in line with the forecasts made by the International Monetary
Fund (IMF) this July. Indeed, although the IMF warns about China’s
loss of momentum, it still anticipates Chinese output growing by
5.2 per cent this year and 4.5 per cent next year.
Do these kinds of figures really warrant all the talk of a ‘slump’,
a ‘downward spiral’ or an ‘unprecedented crisis’? On the contrary,
these are the sort of growth levels that the governments of
developed countries no longer even aspire to. The advanced
economies are projected to grow by 1.5 per cent this year, falling
to 1.4 per cent next year.
China’s secular slowdown is now being reinforced by some genuine
additional challenges. For a start, Beijing’s three years of harsh
Covid lockdowns were an economic and social disaster. Given how the
Western economies have struggled to recover from their own
lockdowns, which were far less brutal and were abandoned much
earlier, it was always fanciful to think that China’s recovery from
its Zero Covid policy would be smooth and steady.
Meanwhile, geopolitical tensions, especially with the US, are also
restraining China’s economy. In particular, US bans on exports and
investments in three advanced technology sectors – semiconductors,
AI and quantum computing – are bound to take a toll on China’s
economic development, at least in the short term. Western efforts
at ‘reshoring’ its supply chains – or, more accurately,
diversifying its overseas production capabilities to friendly
foreign countries – could also soften Chinese growth. Foreign
investment inflows are also set to decline.
It is also true that China’s property sector is in deep trouble. It
has borrowed far too much money and no doubt more defaults and
insolvencies are likely. One firm alone – the infamous Evergrande –
has racked up liabilities worth £290 billion. These problems are
also exacerbating local governments’ financial frailties, as many
local authorities rely on land sales to developers to keep
themselves going. This means the contribution to growth from
property development and local-government investments is unlikely
to match the levels it did in the 2010s.
As a result of all this, it is highly probable that China will
experience a financial crash and / or a recession at some point
over the next few years. The instabilities that are building up are
an inevitable consequence of growth under capitalism, even in an
authoritarian party-state system (though Beijing will no doubt do
its utmost to cover much of this up).
However, these setbacks alone cannot justify the current levels
Western doom-mongering. None of this adds up to a ‘systemic crisis’
or to the end of Chinese development.
Yes, China is undoubtedly encountering rocky economic times. But in
its favour, it is far more resilient than many other mature
industrialised countries. People rightly question just how
resilient Western economies will prove to be when the next shock
hits. Few if any mature nations can fall back on the same cushion
of reserves as China can.
China’s resilience to disruptions is of a different order to the
West primarily because of the strength of its production
fundamentals. Despite the West’s talk of reshoring and
deglobalisation, China is still unquestionably the world’s
manufacturing superpower, responsible for nearly 29 per cent of
global manufacturing output. It produces about the same output as
the next three biggest manufacturing nations – the US, Japan and
Germany – combined.
Nor is China just producing low-quality, low-tech goods. It
currently leads the world in the production of electric vehicles,
electric car batteries, 5G telecommunications equipment, commercial
drones, Internet of Things devices, mobile payments and solar
cells. It is also telling, given the Western obsession with Net
Zero, that China has been the world’s largest and fastest-growing
producer of renewable energy for more than a decade.
While it is certainly true that China has become far more indebted
over the past decade, the reasons for this also point to its
economy’s comparative resilience. Advanced countries like the US
and the UK have mainly got themselves into debt because they have
been subsidising consumption – through bailouts, fiscal stimulus,
loose monetary policy, etc. This has helped to sustain existing
levels of economic activity, but it has left little legacy for the
future. In contrast, most of China’s debt comes from financing
investment. While Western infrastructure has crumbled as debt has
risen, China’s debts have largely financed new and modern assets,
from houses and roads to bridges, airports and seaports to
high-speed railways.
China is often criticised for making ‘unproductive’ investments. It
is true that many of its new houses, apartments and even cities may
be empty or underutilised today. But these at least provide a solid
physical foundation for future growth. Having too many homes and
modern transport services is far preferable to having too few, as
we do in the West.
Besides, it is striking that the downbeat IMF still expects China
to maintain its role as the biggest contributor to global growth.
This year, China will account for one-third of the world’s economic
growth, a similar proportion to the 2010s. Indeed, the West’s
economic recovery after the 2008 financial crash owed much to the
counter-crisis actions taken in Beijing. The Chinese government
stepped in with huge stimulus policies to support its own economy,
which in turn helped prop up the rest of the world. Absent China’s
growth, the Western countries would have been through an even worse
economic decade. And despite China’s slowdown, the IMF still
expects it to contribute to almost a quarter of global growth over
the five years to 2028 – double the amount coming from the
US.
Given all the indicators of China’s continuing economic durability,
why are so many Western commentators so downbeat? It is extremely
difficult to know precisely what is going on in China, given that
access to information is so often controlled and concealed. This
alone should make us at least a little sceptical of the certainty
of so many Western commentators who are predicting China’s economic
doom.
Maybe Schadenfreude has something to do with the dismal
forebodings. Some commentators might be taking pleasure from the
apparent misfortunes of an adversary. Indeed, Western elites hold a
dual view of China, as both a dangerous strategic rival and as an
economic basket case. Despite the element of contradiction here –
is China powerful or weak? – both are consistent with the cranking
up of China-bashing over the past decade.
More broadly, the negativity about the Chinese economy is in
keeping with the deepening pessimism in Western economic thinking.
After the pandemic, amid energy shortages and a war in Ukraine, we
appear more stuck than ever in an economic and political quagmire.
It seems there is little prospect of Western governments regaining
control over developments and putting their economies back on a
path to durable growth.
It often feels as if the West is lurching from one crisis to the
next without ever being able to resolve any of its challenges.
Indeed, ‘permacrisis’ – meaning an extended period of great
difficulty, confusion and insecurity that seems to have no end –
was chosen as Collins Dictionary’s word of the year last year. So
perhaps it’s no surprise that mainstream commentators anticipate a
grave crisis in China, too.
When the radical left predicted the demise of capitalism 50 years
ago, this was one way of displacing its own loss of influence.
Having lost belief in its capacity to gain support from working
people, it was reassuring to imagine that the class enemy would
soon collapse of its own accord. Similarly, a Western elite that
has lost its sense of purpose and confidence might take some solace
from the imminent collapse of its biggest geopolitical adversary.
Back then, the presumption of capitalism’s impending demise said
more about the plight of the radical left than it did about the
condition of capitalism. Similarly, today’s doom-mongering about
China says more about the Western elite’s sense of confusion,
inertia and impotence than about anything really happening in
China.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/09/02/the-fall-of-china-dont-bet-on-it/
