Tuesday, March 10, 2026

China’s economy is heading for a “dead end,” says an instructional

China’s economy is heading for a “dead end,” says an instructional

China’s leaders are banking on a surge in exports to spice up slumping growth, but those measures won’t lift the world’s second-largest economy from the mess it finds itself in, a number one China watcher said.

Anne Stevenson-Yang, co-founder of J Capital Research and writer of Wild Ride: A Brief History of the Opening and Closing of China’s Economyreferred to Beijing’s failures in a single Editorial within the New York Times on Saturday.

“Years of erratic and irresponsible policies, excessive Communist Party control and unfulfilled promises of reform have led to a deadlock in China’s economy, with weak domestic consumer demand and slowing growth,” she wrote. “The only way the Chinese leadership can see to get out of this hole is to resort to expanding exports.”

Stevenson-Yang predicted that it will result in greater tensions with China’s trading partners as low-cost manufactured goods proceed to flood markets, while the Chinese people grow darker and the federal government becomes more repressive.

The root reason for China’s economic problems is the Communist Party’s excessive control, which can not go away, while its policies focused on creating more industrial capability are counterproductive, she said.

Most economists have advisable that China’s leaders loosen their grip on the private sector and encourage more consumption, which might entail government reform – “and that is unacceptable,” she added.

The Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 represented a possibility to liberalize government in response to the growing private sector that had emerged from economic reforms begun a decade earlier. But that might have weakened the facility of the Communist Party, emphasized Stevenson-Yang.

“Instead, China’s leaders chose to shoot protesters, further tighten party control and rely on government investment to stimulate the economy,” she said.

In the many years that followed, China’s investment-driven growth aimed to appease people while its low-cost exports kept prices low within the West. Meanwhile, debts piled up across China, and latest infrastructure and housing went unused.

Now President Xi Jinping is running out of policy options, Stevenson-Yang warned, as Chinese consumers refuse to spice up spending and China’s trading partners throw up more barriers to its exports. In fact, the Biden administration is poised to impose tough tariffs on a variety of Chinese goods. Innovation won’t help either, as China’s economy remains to be based totally on replicating existing technologies, she added.

“All this means that the era of ‘reform and opening-up’ that has transformed China and captivated the world since it began in the late 1970s has ended with a whimper,” she concluded. “Mao Zedong once said that in an uncertain world, the Chinese must ‘dig deep tunnels, store grain everywhere and never seek hegemony.’ That kind of siege mentality is coming back.”

China’s slowing growth, housing crisis, high youth unemployment and US restrictions on key technologies have led to forecasts so-called lost decade of stagnation. Looking at China’s aging population, veteran strategist Ed Yardeni said last yr that the country could develop into “the largest nursing home in the world.”

But a number one China expert warned last month against such pessimism, saying it could lead on the U.S. to develop into complacent.

“Although its growth has slowed in recent years, China is likely to grow twice as fast as the United States in the coming years,” wrote Nicholas Lardy, a senior fellow on the Peterson Institute for International Economics Foreign Affairs

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