The economists never get it right. Being in China for more than 30 years I can tell the Chinese growth model is really simple: #1 An international economy and

The economists never get it right. Being in China for more than 30 years I can tell the Chinese growth model is really simple: #1 An international economy and market so that we have a common currency to measure. The government also controls foreign exchange so that the "valuation" can be bumped to a high level. #2 A billion slaves so that you can get things done really quick and nobody would ever challenge. #3 No cost. In China pretty much everything is owned by "the public", so that those "country owned" companies can get the land and other resources with a very low price or even free. Labor is cheap. And you don't need to clean up the waste you produce: you can just throw them anywhere. The companies have no incentive for efficiency improvements so that the resources consumption is fast. Before the "economic reform" in 1990s #1 didn't exist so you only see the growth in recent years. This is a damn simple business and even a dog can make a lot money out of it easily. It is not replicatable (#2/#3) so it only happened in China. This is of course unsustainable. The minerals are exhausted, the environment is polluted and most of the people are still poor and the population getting old due to the one child policy. I would say we may see a collapse in the future 5 years or even less.