[Epoch Times, 26 settembre 2022](Full report by The Epoch Times reporter Zhang Ting) Sebastian Mallaby, senior researcher in international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations, said on Sept. 24 an article titled “These Signs That China is Beginning to Collapse” in the Washington Post.epidemic、real estatethe crackdown on tech giants and China’s demographic problems.
Malaby opened the question by asking, is China an economic giant and will it quickly overtake the US in terms of technology in the future? Still a sick giant, influenced by demographics,real estatePlagued by crises and counterproductive government mandates?
Malaby said the answer to that skill question is both. But he is quick to point out that China’s weakness is increasingly dominating his strengths.
Malaby listed in the CCP articleDevelopments in areas such as drones, mobile payments and 5G networking equipment and artificial intelligence illustrate why some fear China will one day overtake the United States. But Malaby said,As for the CCP leaders, they face deeper challenges.
This year, China’s economic growth is expected to be just over 3 percent, he said. It is well below the official target of 5.5%; a farce compared to China’s economic performance ten years ago, when annual growth was around 8%. The CCP will attribute the slowdown to idiosyncratic obstacles. But these obstacles collectively point to the bigger picture, “an authoritarian system is reaching its limits”.
The first hurdle, Malaby said, was COVID-19 everywhere in ChinaepidemicIf there are signs of an outbreak, the CCP will implement severe blocking measures. Shanghai, Shenzhen and dozens of other cities have suffered an economically devastating curfew, disrupting global supply chains and causing food shortages and other hardships for millions of people. In the Chinese border town of Ruili, which borders Myanmar, residents were prevented from leaving their homes for a total of 119 days between March 2021 and April 2022, Bloomberg Businessweek recently reported.
At a time when most countries in the world are gradually opening up their economies and implementing the “virus coexistence” policy, the CCP’s extreme “coexistence”clearpolicy ”has aroused dissatisfaction among an increasing number of Chinese. Early in the morning of September 18, a bus carrying COVID-19 quarantined people in Guizhou overturned, killing 27 people. Although local officials apologized, it was difficult to quell people’s anger.
Netizen “Nobita Nobi” said: “Apologizing cannot revive the deceased and the betrayal of trust must be chilling. This incident consumes the trust of society as a whole. The gap in social trust cannot be repaired with sincere apologies. Also. , sincerity cannot be proved by a word, a manuscript or a bow. And the transfer is still in progress … “
The second obstacle facing the CCP, Malaby said, is the real estate issue. Once again, the CCP has made political decisions that discourage private consumption. As a result, state bias policies promote unhealthy growth in the housing market.
In the 2000s, China manipulated its currency, which increased exports but also led to unsustainable trade surpluses, he said. The Communist Party’s next move is to order banks and local governments to promote the rise of the construction industry. While stimulating growth again, it replaced unsustainable purchases of foreign bonds with unsustainable domestic debt. As a result, China’s largest real estate developer defaulted on its debt. Buyers of unfinished apartments are furious, and the mortgage boycott has spread to more than a hundred cities. House prices have fallen for 12 consecutive months. With the real estate sector leading more than a quarter of the economy, the collapse of the sector threatens a wider recession in the Chinese economy.
A third hurdle casts a shadow over China’s power in the tech sector, Malaby said. For political reasons, the CCP cannot tolerate tech giants aspiring to be Elon Musk-style influencers. These people list companies on foreign stock exchanges and set up companies to help Chinese students apply to foreign universities. The Chinese government has cracked down on these tech giants. And the CCP will not encourage the next generation of technologists to start companies in China.
The fourth hurdle, Malaby said, is China’s demographics: in 1979, in another statist madness, the CCP leaders enacted a tough one-child policy that led to sex-selective abortions, gender imbalances, and rapidly falling birth rates. The government finally turned to a two-child policy in 2016 when it recognized the trigger it had triggered that threatened to trigger a demographic crisis. Last year, in a panic, the government announced a three-child policy, as well as plans to encourage fertility, but it was too late and the fertility rate showed no signs of recovery.
China’s workforce is aging due to falling birth rates, and demographic changes are feared to lead to higher pension costs and lower economic growth.
According to the BBC, Yi Fuxian, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that due to demographic problems, the Chinese economy may not be able to outrun the size of the United States at all. He also said that unlike developed countries, the Chinese economy is like a plane, still in the air, but suddenly there is not enough manpower, just like the plane suddenly runs out of fuel, which will be a disaster. for the Chinese economy and also for the world economy.
All of these obstacles are not good news, Malaby said. The CCP’s “centralized economic model is coming to an end,” he tweeted on Sunday (September 25), summarizing his article about him in the Washington Post.
Responsible editor: Lin Yan #
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