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People rarely think about the crashes China had in the last 5 decades - the great leap forward movement, the culture revolution, the massive layoff in the mid t
by dis-sys 9y ago
People rarely think about the crashes China had in the last 5 decades - the great leap forward movement, the culture revolution, the massive layoff in the mid to late 90s that saw tens of millions out of their jobs. Suddenly the exact same system/government that caused all those crashes are now ready to deflate the current bubble in an orderly fashion?
How all these happened in the first place? Because the central government had the full power to control the entire economy!
In a smaller scale, how about the recent stock market crash? Media stopped talking about it as it is no longer that newsworthy, but how about those 100 million investors who actually invested their life savings into that stock market? Have you ever calculated their annual returns in the last say 15 years? Did that bubble got deflated in an orderly manner?
Repeatedly, history has shown again and again that hard working smart Chinese people are paying heavy prices to overcome the burdens brought to them by those highly inefficient Chinese central governments, this never changed since the Han Dynasty, it is never about the government/system, the biggest difference is the people.
In case you have no idea of the definition of the current bubble, let me give you one - I live in Shanghai, there are millions of those ugly apartments built before the 90s which were basically handed over to local residents for free, the vast majority of them are located in average or above average areas. Thanks to a "booming" market, nowadays you need to pay $1m to get one of those 70 sqm ones. Did the CCP give every household $1m? No, they give you a bubble and you are paying for it. Oh, btw, Beijing is 20% more expensive than that even when the living conditions there are worse for obvious reasons.
- rm_-rf_slash 9y agoBingo. There is no historical law which states that more control enables more stability. Overly-controlling situations can just as easily cause more harm than good. China saw that play out repeatedly under Mao, while at the same time America's many attempts to control the Vietnam War ended in abject failure. I think the real danger, however, is not what the CCP controls, but rather the peripheries that it cannot control, such as shadow banking and capital outflows (think the newly middle/upper-middle class Chinese family parking assets in overseas real estate; China's government cannot exert eminent domain in Vancouver or Miami).
- dmix 9y agoOne big difference now is the scale of this potential crisis is massive. A lot more is at stake here and the state is highly motivated to keep things as stable as possible. Despite the inefficacy of the Chinese government, and I do entirely agree with you that they are continually on fragile ground as the tentacles of the government continually wrap around every aspect of the economy, they still have beat many peoples projections that they'd have a big recession/debt crisis by now.