“As long as you’re green, you’re growing. As soon as you’re ripe, you start to rot,” once remarked Ray Kroc, mastermind of the McDonald’s franchise empire.
At the moment, no truer words can be spoken for China’s ripe economy. The Middle Kingdom’s 30-year economic boom is being overcome with the unpleasant odor that befalls rotting vegetables. What’s more, there’s no way to reverse it.
Photo credit: fmh
Economic activity in China is stalling out. All of the sudden, the mistakes that were hidden by a growing economy are surfacing en masse. Excess capacity is turning up in all corners of the economy and no one knows what to do about it.
Each day, it seems, new rot comes to bear upon Beijing’s central planners. Somehow the miracle workers have lost their hot hand. A slowing economy, falling stock market, exodus of wealth, and weakening currency are not conforming to the graphs and statistics reported in the latest blueprint for the planned economy.
How could it be that the professional politicians, who’d sparkled with genius all these years, so grossly missed their targets? Aren’t the talented men, who’d lorded over a contrived capitalism all these years, capable of fixing this? Perhaps these are the wrong questions to be asking.
China’s Politburo – from left to right, Zhang Gaoli, Liu Yunshan, Zhang Dejiang, president Xi Jinping, prime minister Li Keqiang, Yu Zhengsheng, Wang Qishan (Wang is running Xi’s anti-corruption effort. If you want to find him, go to Zhongnanhai and ask for Wang’s wing).
Photo credit: Carlos Barria / Reuters
Individual Preferences
Simply put, an economy cannot be executed by a central government to fulfill the objectives of a five year plan. At times this may appear to be so. But these instances are mere coincidence…not the result of an erudite centralized mastery.
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