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China is reportedly scrubbing the internet of negative coverage of its economy
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2024
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Sure, but China suffers from enormous environmental cost as well (cement is ridiculously terrible for the environment; now think about what drives most of their paper growth), under an inherently unstable hybrid between market capitalism and state economy, coupled with what can only be described as a demographic WMD, an erratic leadership that, through purges after purges after purges, is busy erasing even the pretense that it's operating under technocratic principles - and on top of that, you get these heave-handed attempts at information control. The latter in particular has never ever worked at making people forget that the economy is on a downwards trajectory with absolutely no sign of even slowing down, let alone a solution that doesn't involve launching a major war in Asia in the hopes that rallying around the flag will somehow prevent the whole house of cards the CCP has been busy building over the last couple of decades from crashing down.
Xi inherited many of the issues China is suffering from, but he also inherited a nation that was slowly opening itself and reversed that course almost from day one. Instead of realizing the untapped potential the emerging Chinese civil society had, he only saw it as a threat and clamped down on it through positively Maoist measures. He has also done everything in his power to make the economic situation worse, all in the name of securing his rule and that of his party (in that order). Xi's answer to economic woes and the demographic decline is mass slavery, which I feel the world will finally stop accepting the moment China oversteps its bounds towards the outside. A war against Taiwan would do it, but I feel like even a major escalation in their (at this point) ten dash line imperialism, perhaps against Japan, could be enough to trigger substantial backlash.
In 1971 there was an oil crisis that put an end to the post-war consensus in the US, and the deindustrialization that followed was a shift to a more professional service financial economy. In China Mao had died and the Cultural Revolution was over. Deng opened up the country to capitalism through a Soviet-style manufacturing push and the creation of economic zones. So we have this relationship between the world's largest consumer economy and the world's largest manufacturing economy up to the present day. China's economic growth currently is outpacing other developed countries post-covid, and they represent a greater percentage of worldwide economic growth than the US, they have the single largest share of the world's economic growth.
People in the US who criticize China for polluting is incredibly ironic in this context. US capital interests are more than happy to exploit China's manufacturing sector, and China takes the blame for all the things that brings with it.
How much of this is growth comes from construction? How can we know we can trust the numbers out of China?
Begs the question of how you're substantiating any claims if you can't trust any information to base it on. Use a critical US report on China's economy if you want. A granular distribution of GDP by economic sector is the data you're asking about, a legit resource will serve you better than a random internet commenter. You'll find their service economy is where the percentage share of growth has been wherever you look.