China’s Dead-End Economy Is Bad News for Everyone
Ms. Stevenson-Yang is a co-founder of J Capital Research and the author of “Wild Ride: A Short History of the Opening and Closing of the Chinese Economy.”
On separate visits to Beijing last month, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen bore a common message: Chinese manufacturing overcapacity is flooding global markets with cheap Chinese exports, distorting world trade and leaving American businesses and workers struggling to compete.
Not surprisingly, China’s leaders did not like what they heard, and they didn’t budge. They can’t. Years of erratic and irresponsible policies, excessive Communist Party control and undelivered promises of reform have created a dead-end Chinese economy of weak domestic consumer demand and slowing growth. The only way that China’s leaders can see to pull themselves out of this hole is to fall back on pumping out exports.
That means a number of things are likely to happen, none of them good. The tide of Chinese exports will continue, tensions with the United States and other trading partners will grow, China’s people will become increasingly unhappy with their gloomy economic prospects and anxious Communist Party leaders will respond with more repression.
