When scholars of international relations predict that the 2000s will be a “Chinese century”, they are not being premature. Although America remains the lone superpower, China has already replaced it as the driver of global change.
Trump haters may be tempted to conclude from all this that he is about to lead America into a sudden decline, but that is not the point. This American decade started under President Obama, continued under Mr. Trump and survived congressional gridlock throughout, showing that the economy often rises above politics. The economy is driven less by ideology than by its own internal cycles, and this cycle has been turning in America’s favor for so long that it is unlikely to last much longer.
The biggest national security issues, however, arise from the unpredictable political impact of a recession in China. We learned this, or should have, during the 1997 to 1998 Asian crisis. China may have had a disguised recession or near recession in 1998, but it was in a much smaller economy. Apart from that one episode there is no collective memory of recession and how to deal with it. As such, China is now psychologically unprepared to deal with the challenges of a recession.
China’s economy grew at a slower quarterly pace than expected, expanding 6.5 per cent in the three months ended September, as the country’s trade war with the US exacted a toll on exporters and manufacturers. The quarterly growth pace lagged the 6.6 per cent expected in a Bloomberg poll of economists, and was slower than the 6.7 per cent clip in the second quarter, according to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics in Beijing.
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In the decade since the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the start of the global financial crisis, the world economy has registered stronger growth than many realize, owing in large part to China. But in the years ahead, global economic imbalances and troubling trends in the business world will continue to pose economic as well as political risks.
Is the GDP true? Of course, it isn’t. But that isn’t really important in some ways. Almost all numbers in China are open for debate. As anyone who spends time dealing with the place knows, China is full of data and numbers, and while some may be true, that doesn’t mean the data set being described is complete.
Falsifying or padding out data has been refined to an art form among China’s local bureaucrats, since good economic growth figures not only look and feel good but are benchmarks for their career advancement.This has given rise to a popular saying that “data makes an official and an official makes data”.
For the first time since 2010, the world economy is outperforming most predictions, and we expect this strength to continue. Our global GDP forecast for 2018 is 4.0%, up from 3.7% in 2017 and meaningfully above consensus. The strength in global growth is broad-based across most advanced and emerging economies, says a Goldman Sachs report on the global economy.
Today, the world’s major economies are experiencing a steady recovery, despite the occasional setback. To be sure, economic performance is far from reaching its full potential: depending on where one looks, one can find output gaps, excess leverage, fragile balance sheets, under-investment, and unfunded longer-term non-debt liabilities. Still, financial markets show no signs of convulsion, even as monetary stimulus is gradually withdrawn.
The fixation on headline GDP overlooks deeper issues shaping the China growth debate. That is because the Chinese economy is in the midst of an extraordinary structural transformation – with a manufacturing-led producer model giving way to an increasingly powerful services-led consumer model.
