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Further Reading

China's Bubble Economy

During the mid-20th Century, the legitimacy of the Chineese Communist government rested on Communist ideology, and the "iron rice bowl" of cradle to grave wages and benefits. More recently, regime legitimacy, considered broadly, has been predicated on rapid economic growth. A failure to sustain such growth would pose a serious challenge to regime legitimacy.

The US National Intelligence Council's Global Trends 2025 report noted in November 2008 [pg 50] "Although a protracted slump could pose a serious political threat, the regime would be tempted to deflect public criticism by blaming China's woes on foreign interference, stoking the more virulent and xenophobic forms of Chinese nationalism. Historically, people who become accustomed to rising living standards react angrily when their expectations are no longer met, and few people have had grounds for such high expectations as do the Chinese. China's international standing is based partly on foreigners' calculations that it is "the country of the future." If foreigners treat the country less deferentially, nationalistic Chinese could respond angrily."

The conventional wisdom on Asia's economy is that the economic challenges ahead center on China's rapid rise. Economists debate about hard or soft landings and a possible bursting of the China economic bubble. For two decades pessimists have suggested that China's economic bubble will inevitably burst - that it will not be able to feed itself or that it will run out of steam for lack of energy. The world has a very large stake in China's success. It is one of the main engines of growth in the world economy.

A bubble is a situation that can occur when the price of an asset rises far higher than the item is actually worth. The assumption is that the next buyer will pay an even higher price for the asset. Major speculative economic bubbles have been known to occur from time to time, often with ruinous effects. Sometimes they are triggered by inexplicable phenomena (fads or crazes) or are kindled by the manipulative actions of individuals or corporations.

At the peak of the Dutch tulip mania in February 1637, tulip futures contracts sold for more than 10 times the annual income of a skilled craftsman. During the British Railway Mania of the 1840s, the newly emerging middle class invested their savings in prospective railway companies; many of those lost everything when the bubble collapsed. In the 1920s Americans overextended themselves to take advantage of the soaring stock market and expanding credit. When the Federal Reserve raised interest rates, the stock market crashed and the bank panics began. Florida's first real estate bubble was based on outside speculators, easy credit access for buyers, and rapidly appreciating property values for Florida swampland.

For decades Japan was the source of by far the largest foreign investment, foreign trade and foreign assistance for Southeast Asia. By the late 1980s Japan was referring to its relations with the nations of Southeast Asia as a "flying geese pattern" with Japan as the lead goose. But the bursting of Japan's economic bubble in 1991, and its failure to open its markets to goods from SEA following the Asian financial crisis cooked the lead goose, and Japan - while still important in the region - remains on the defensive against growing influence from Beijing and booming PRC trade with the region. The bursting of the economic "bubble" in 1991 saw the value of land and other assets collapse. The bursting of the asset bubble led to the collapse of Japan's banking sector and to persistent deflation, both of which have dampened domestic demand for two decades. The 1990s have been dubbed Japan's "Lost Decade", during which Japan's economy grew approximately 1 percent annually, compared to about 4 percent per year in the 1980s. Japan has struggled with low but stubborn deflation since 1998.

Even financial-world insiders had a hard time grasping the scope of the economic bubble in housing and finance that evolved during the since 2001. In hindsight, the bubble in the U.S. housing market, the first indication of what would become a global financial crisis in the fall of 2008, should have been obvious. The prices of houses had risen beyond the salaries of many ordinary Americans, but the availability of new, riskier mortgage products fueled the rush to home ownership. What's more, the inflation in their real estate values had many homeowners feeling wealthy. Historically in the United States, housing prices had always gone up. Once asset values began to collapse, the banking and insurance crises occurred within months.

An unprecedented U.S. housing bubble began to inflate in the first quarter of 1998 and then popped in the second quarter of 2006. By 2008 the American housing bubble had run out of (good) borrowers. The result was that the remaining class of assets, commodities, became the next bubble, with oil quadrupling in price and basic foodstuffs rising between 40 and 70 percent in a little over a year. However, with the exception of oil, these were small markets, too small to sustain such volumes of liquidity, and these bubbles burst quickly. The commodity market collapse combined with losses in the subprime sector of the mortgage derivatives market triggered the Great Recession.

The 1997 Asian financial crisis brought this issue into sharp focus, and several commentators speculated about whether China's economic problems will overwhelm it. It is useful to remember that predictions of doom and collapse for an economy generally are no more accurate than those that foresee unending growth and freedom from the business cycle. Take them all with the appropriate dosage of salt, and keep focused on what really matters: enterprise reform, not growth rates, trade surpluses or currency markets. If China sustains its efforts to fix what is wrong with its economic structure, it will be able to overcome its short-term problems.

By 2010 Chine's economy was growing at nearly 10 percent, as though the global financial crisis never occurred. The Chinese government has poured money into pouring concrete, maintaining high employment with infrastructure and real estate projects. In 2009, new floor space doubled and residential real estate prices surged 25 percent. The Chinese keep building new skyscrapers even though existing ones remain vacant. Kangbashi is a brand new city has been constructed in the desert in Inner Mongolia. It is a "ghost city". There are rows and rows of new apartment blocks with nobody living in them.

Sharp increase in house prices combined with the extraordinary Chinese lending growth during 2009 has led to concerns of an emerging real estate bubble. For China as a whole, as of late 2010 the levels of house prices did not seem significantly higher than would be justified by underlying fundamentals. However, there are signs of overvaluation in some cities' mass-market and luxury segments. Unlike advanced economies before 2007-8, prices have tended to correct frequently in China. Given persistently low real interest rates, lack of alternative investment and mortgage-to-GDP trend, rapid property price growth in China has, and will continue to have, a structural driver. Structurally low real interest rates (particularly relative to income growth), high saving (and therefore ample liquidity), and a lack of alternative investment and property tax all work to promote excessive house price inflation. Given the importance of the real estate sector in China's economy, the adverse impact of abrupt corrections in property prices is a serious concern.

Eswar Prasad, the senior professor of trade policy at Cornell University, and formerly the head of the IMF's China Division, noted in 2008 that a lot of money has been funneled to state enterprises, which are financially unviable, and by 2008 the legacy of those non-performing loans was coming home to roost. Banking sector weaknesses have contributed to the very unbalanced pattern of economic development in recent years, which means that investment has been the primary driver of growth, accounting for almost 40 percent of GDP and more than half of GDP growth in recent years. The investment boom has raised fears of a resurgence in non-performing loans if the economy were to slow down and there are also risks of asset-priced bubbles and a future deflation in the economy.

By late 2010 Richard Duncan, chief economist at Blackhorse Asset Management Pte., warned that China's economy is history's biggest bubble and may be headed for collapse. "China has the greatest economic bubble in history," said Duncan, author of "The Dollar Crisis" first published in 2003. "There's a real risk it's going to collapse in a Great Depression-style scenario."

China doesn't provide its citizens with many investment outlets. Real estate happens to be one of the few options available. By December 2010 residential real estate in 35 large and medium-sized cities in China was, on average, about 29.5 percent overpriced, according to estimates of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). CASS, which is affiliated with China's State Council, said in five of those cities, homes are over 50 percent overpriced. The Chinese real estate bubble, which increased several-fold over the last few years, is more severe compared to the US bubble. Like all bubbles, a collapse in the Chinese market would be a serious risk to the confidence and the economy.

Diana Choyleva of Lombard Street Research, said "China is trying to keep the game going as if nothing has changed, but cannot do so. It dares not raise rates fast enough to let air out of the bubble because this would expose the bad debts of the banking system. The Chinese growth machine is likely to continue to function in the minds of people long after it has no visible means of support. China's potential growth rate could well halve to 5 percent this decade."

In China, spending on fixed-asset investment is an important measure of infrastructure spending, heavily weighted toward government and real estate projects. The figure hovered around 20 percent of gross domestic product in the United States, and about 35 percent of gross domestic product in Japan at the peak of its building boom in the 1980s. In China it equals nearly 70 percent of gross domestic product. This helps explain China's high economic growth rates [as it fueled Japan's growth in the 1980s] but as with Japan, it also reflects a dangerous dependence on infrastructure spending.

On 27 June 2011, China's National Audit Office (NAO) released a comprehensive audit report on local government debt, which provides greater clarity on the size and breakdown of such liabilities. The NAO assesses this debt at RMB 10.7 trillion, of which RMB 8.5 trillion are funded by bank loans. However, the NAO report is understating the size of the local government loans that could become problematic. The credit rating agency Moody’s said China’s local government debt may be 3.5 trillion renminbi ($540 billion) larger than auditors estimated, potentially putting banks on the hook for deeper losses that could threaten their credit ratings.

Albert Edwards, from Societe Generale, stated that "I remain convinced we are witnessing a bubble of epic proportions which will burst - catching investors as unawares as the bursting of the Asian bubbles of the mid-1990s."

The Chinese Government's failure to satisfy popular needs for job creation could trigger political unrest. Financial distress would also worsen corruption, compound unemployment, poverty, and social unrest, and reduce foreign direct investment. The "iron rice bowl" of cradle to grave wages and benefits has disappeared and a modern social safety net has not yet been erected. If China's economy takes a downward turn, regional security would weaken, resulting in heightened prospects for political instability, crime, narcotics trafficking, and illegal migration. China could face significant domestic political instability and violence, and sustained armed unrest from separatist movements along its western borders. China's leadership would almost certainly take a "hard line" approach to these domestic challenges, and would be equally likely to take a hard line on international issues as well. Concerns regarding regional stability are likely to grow, owing to the ongoing crisis over North Korea, and continuing tensions between China and Taiwan and Japan. Chinese suspicions, misperceptions and miscalculations could lead to a military clash.