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China is aging so rapidly that it urgently needs to address the problem of a rapidly declining work force in a slowly declining population. To give an idea of relative population changes among the three most populous countries, today

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While debt-to-GDP ratios already have a limited but very misunderstood use, it seems economists are finding bright new ways of misunderstanding them. Now we say that when nominal interest rates are lower than nominal growth rates, the

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downward pressure on the debt-to-GDP ratio makes rising government debt and larger government deficits more sustainable and more easily justified.

This is totally confused. When the nominal interest rate is lower than the nominal GDP growth rate, it only means that net...

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borrowers are getting a disproportionate share of growth relative to net lenders. This in and of itself changes the comparability of the debt-to-GDP ratio, so the fact that the ratio may decline tells us nothing about its sustainability which, I'm glad to say, isn't...

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a mistake Olivier Blanchard makes in this article.

At least three things matter. First, whether or not rising debt is sustainable depends almost wholly on underlying conditions in the real economy, and only trivially on the arithmetical relationship between...

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the interest rate and the growth rate. Second, this approach simply assumes away financial distress costs, in which case debt capacity is infinite anyway and the interest rate becomes irrelevant. And third, it assumes that the nominal debt level matters independently...

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The latest IMF report on China was released yesterday and provides a lot of good information and intelligent insight on the Chinese economy. The IMF’s measure of China’s adjusted fiscal deficit (including estimated off-budget

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spending) is projected to rise to 18.2% of GDP in 2020 from 12.6% in 2019. The authors correctly note the worrying surge in debt and warn that Beijing must continue to try to contain financial stability risks, but I notice that they are projecting average GDP...

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growth of just over 6% between 2012 and 2025, including a downward revision of their 2021 forecast from 8.2% to 7.9% (which I still think is a little high).

As I’ve long argued, it will be impossible for China both to control the surge in debt and to achieve growth...

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targets above the real underlying growth rate of the economy, which I suspect is 2-3% at best. I know the IMF is constrained in what it is able to say about the Chinese economy if it wants to remain part of the advisory process, but I do think that after 10 years...

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of watching this game we should be a lot more explicit about the relationship between unreasonably high GDP growth targets and high credit growth. There really is no point in advising Beijing to get financial risks under control while at the same time approving...

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It is a little frustrating to see the response many analysts had to the GDP growth data Chinese released today. These numbers aren’t especially good, and they certainly shouldn’t have been surprising. Back in April and May, when most

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were projecting negative or barely positive GDP growth for China in 2020 (the OECD, for example, expected China’s GDP to contract by 3.7%), I insisted that GDP growth for 2020 would be positive, and probably between 2% and 3%.

Today, it was reported as 2.3%. How did...

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I know? Because I knew that while most of the healthy sources of Chinese growth would contract (except for exports, which would expand given Beijing’s intense supply-side response to the impact of Covid-19), Beijing was going to respond to a significant...

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worsening of the healthy parts of its economy by unleashing enough of the unhealthy, non-productive growth it has long tried to constrain – basically real estate and infrastructure investment – in order to achieve as much economic activity as it...

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needed for domestic political ends.

And that’s exactly what happened. While GDP grew by 6.5% in the fourth quarter, even with substantial tailwinds its retail sales measure – a proxy for consumption – was only up 4.6%, and it was down 3.9% overall in 2020.

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An article worth thinking about: “As changes to the world structure accelerate, China’s rule is in sharp contrast with the turmoil in the West,” says Beijing.

I agree, but I draw a different conclusion. The world is certainly currently

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through "a period of turbulent change", in Beijing’s words, and great structural adjustments, but usually when that happens, what matters in the long run is not how stable a system seems but rather how successfully political, economic and social institutions adjust to...

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the new conditions. In the past these adjustments have almost always been messy, chaotic, and disheartening to most, but ultimately they were necessary even if we were unable to judge them so at the time.

I would argue that the world today is undergoing both a reversal...

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and rejection of the current model of globalization and an urgent need for most countries in the world, including China, to initiate a major rebalancing of the way income and wealth (and ultimately political power) is distributed, but there are few if any historical...

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precedents in which this level of restructuring and rebalancing have been neat or orderly.

Beijing's response, which is to do whatever it takes to maintain stability, may look good in the short term, as this strategy always does, but if it prevents the necessary...

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Good article. But while growing international criticism and rising trade tensions may have had some impact, as the article suggests, I don’t think they really explain the great reversal in BRI lending of the past few years.

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As I have been writing since 2011, China’s development lending was always likely to follow the pattern of other countries when they first “went out” (e.g. the US in the 1920s, USSR in the 1950s, Japan in the late 1970s). Because of little historical...

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knowledge and no previous experience, an early rapid rise in development lending would be driven mainly by underestimating risk and an overestimation of their own business "success" in making loans, and would of course be further supported by geopolitical ambitions.

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This combination would inevitably lead to bad lending decisions, followed just as inevitably by debt restructuring, loan losses, and a contraction in development lending. In the 1920s, for example, the US set off quite explicitly and aggressively to displace England in...

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Latin America, and American businesses and banks assumed they “understood” Latin America much better than the English did, in spite of the vast English experience there, but their early displacement of British lending only resulted in the huge loan losses of the 1930s.

As someone who actually grew up in China in 1980s, I can actually talked abt how commemoration of Nanjing Massacre changed inside China. I will make a thread

I was born in Oct 1976. 1 month after Mao died. I went to elementary school in China in 1982. my 1st to 4th grade was during honeymoon period btw Japan and China. We learn abt horrors of Hiroshima bombing and how Japan was a victim of US Imperialism

1985 was a pivotal year in Sino-Japanese relations. On the 40the year of Japanese surrender, Japanese PM Yasuhiro Nakasone visited Yasukuni shrine for the 1st time after WW2 Japanese war criminals had been enshrined there in 1978.

Another development was discovery in 1980s of 1 the most notorious Japanese war crime: Unit 731, biological and chemical weapon research unit of Imperial Japanese Army that performed lethal live human experiments on Chinese and Allied prisoners in China

In 1986, the 1st mainland China film on KMT fighting Japan, 血战台儿庄abt Battle of Tai'erzhuang, 1st major Chinese victory over Japan immediately aft Nanjiang Massacre came out. I learn abt Nanjing Massacre that year, I was 10.

Who goes to work for China’s defense industry? In our latest, @emily_sw1 and I mapped talent flows between 🇨🇳 universities and defense SOEs.

🚨 We found that U.S. tech companies are indirectly aiding China's military.

Thread: (1/10)

2/10 In our report for @CSETGeorgetown, we measured the relationships between elite 🇨🇳 universities and China's defense industry by looking at their Graduate Employment Quality Reports.

Kudos to @alexjoske @ASPI_org for highlighting these sources:

3/10 We looked at disaggregated employment data for 29 of 45 leading universities—China’s Double First Class universities + those administered by MIIT.

Our dataset reflects the career moves of 140,000 Chinese university graduates in 2019.

6,000 took jobs at defense SOEs.

4/10 We confirmed that 🇨🇳 defense giants like CASC, CETC, and CSIC disproportionately recruit from seven universities: the Seven Sons of National Defense (国防七子).

The Seven Sons produced just 16% of graduates in our dataset, but 72% of those who took jobs at defense SOEs.

5/10 Then we started looking into the resources available to Chinese universities, investigating documents from the Ministry of Education.

MOE frequently "asks" foreign companies to help Chinese universities in research & curriculum development—the price of doing business in 🇨🇳.

@dhruv_rajnish @TheKidneyDocto1 See i m trying to keep here my point of view on Democracy in China.. okay.. China isn't a dictatorship if u exclude this Xi Jinping and Mao era.. They conduct fair elections where every candidate is supported by CCP.. They represent people.. (1/2)

@TheKidneyDocto1 China says, they have their own way of Democracy and they don't copy the west.. See "Stability" is most important in a country, especially in economic factors.. what happens in India is, if tomorrow a new govt of a different party comes, (2/3)

@TheKidneyDocto1 it will scrap the economic policies formed by the previous govts and again start a new different policy..It don't benefit anyone.See how Vietnam made most of the profit of Chinese boycott..Vietnam is not a democracy..See now everything comes now to the definition of Democracy 3/4

@TheKidneyDocto1 China and Chinese proudly say that they have Democracy.. Try asking one of them..
Now ethnic minorities..Okay..You do know that bhutan is the happiest country of the world..Many say that one of its reason is, they sent back the Nepalese ethinic groups back to Nepal and India..4/5

@TheKidneyDocto1 Now they live as a single ethinic community..China also doing the same.. They want Han Chinese to be one ethnic group and an atheist nation.. You may not agree with me, but i feel they are doing good.. See if all citezens will be Atheists and one single race, 5/6

The CCTV's program is discussing China's eliminating poverty.
Today's theme is that govt should provide more sports facilities for remote areas and advocate healthier lifestyle.
China's experience is that eliminating poverty ≠ giving money, but providing sustainable solutions.

By the end of December 2019, China's rural poor people's participation in medical insurance rate has reached 99.99%.
More than 16 million poor people in China have received basic treatment services.

The China govt has formulated a three-year action plan to achieve the overall goal of ensuring basic medical care for the rural poor.
There are three main goals, six special actions and ten working standards.
It's called "health poverty alleviation plan".

Since 2016, China's Health Commission, poverty alleviation Bureau and other govt departments have organized nearly one million staff to investigate the prevalence of poverty people in all rural areas, and establish data platform to achieve accurate management.

China has constructed a mechanism of basic medical insurance, serious illness medical insurance and medical assistance linkage system.
All the insurance level has been improved.
Within three years, the govt has subsidized more than 10 billion yuan.

Xi Jinping's speech at Davos boiled down to: The world has no choice but to do business with China, and if you want to do business with China, you need to stop criticizing our tyranny and questioning our lies about the

Xi's address to the World Economic Forum will serve as well as any other moment for historians to mark the beginning of the Authoritarian Era. He said nothing new, but he restated the narratives and demands of Chinese fascism from a post-pandemic position of aggressive strength.

For the first time, Xi spoke to a world that is beginning to accept the tenets of authoritarianism, thanks to the incredible political and economic damage from China's coronavirus. China's ideals have become as viral as Covid-19.

Thanks to the pandemic, the political elites of the world now universally see their citizens as dangerous mobs that must be tightly controlled for their own good. Most of them always thought that way, but now they can say it openly and act aggressively on their prejudices.

Xi clearly stated that China will not be contained, censured, or judged for its actions. He denounced Western ideals of human rights as "arrogance" and imperialism. After Covid and Biden's inauguration, he sees no nation with the strength or will to thwart China's ambitions.