The world is worried about China, but not for the right reasons. Global financial markets were roiled after the world’s second largest economy notched only a 7.7% boost to GDP in the first quarter — a drool-worthy performance for most nations, but a disappointment for a country that routinely jumped 10% or more over the past three decades. Economists are busily debating the usual: Will China have a hard or soft landing? Will the government step in and stimulate growth? Those questions miss the bigger picture. The reality is that China is unlikely to witness those astronomical growth rates, at least for some time. We may never see them again.
The recent slowdown is not a temporary cyclical blip or solely the knockoff effect of the tepid global recovery. China’s growth model is broken and can’t be so easily fixed. Since the start of capitalist reforms in the 1980s, China excelled by throwing tons of resources into a modernizing economy — mountains of cash to build factories, roads and apartment towers, and millions of poor people into making iPads, blue jeans and cars. Under China’s “state capitalism,” bureaucrats often directed the cash into massive infrastructure projects or favored industries. However, this growth engine can’t keep purring indefinitely. The pools of idle labor that filled Foxconn’s assembly lines are drying up — China’s one-child policy made sure of that, by aging the population more rapidly. The workforce has already started to shrink. Even more worrying, the state-led, investment-obsessed system spawns too much debt and too many factories, leading to wasted resources and a debased financial sector.