China’s economic crisis
At a glance, Buoyant’s focus on China’s retail manufacturing sector is a race away from the US and other advanced economies in areas including batteries, robotics and biotechnology. And yet its domestic economy is in deep trouble, suffering from high unemployment rates, consumer confidence, and business investment amid falling housing.
These conflicts have been shaped in sectors such as cars – the EV industry, for example, is both flourishing and renewed, depending on the perspective you need, for being its biggest predator, for being the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases.
To understand China is to believe that all these things are true. It is a fast-moving and slow-moving economy at the same time, a tech superpower that creates opportunities for Phd scientists but not under it for rural workers, a nation that makes a third of the world’s production but will not revive demand at home. Its growth model is so striking that it is out of step with the global economy. In short, China is at war with itself; Taking the long view, the current US-China Trade Spat is a sideshow.
EVS is a case in point. Byd exit-invents Tesla; The latest batteries just provide about 250 miles on five charges. However, the EV sector as a whole is suffering from massive restructuring that adds to the country’s mountain of debt and growth: The collapse of more than 100 EV makers, depressing profits – a common phenomenon in China known as “caused.”
There are other anomalies. China, the world’s undisputed leader in renewable energy, installed more solar panels in the first half of this year than the entire US, and is studying to build the largest turbine in the US. However it still finds fossil fuel output in it to meet the demands of its red hot burning sector; Proposals for new and renewable coal hit the top ten in the first half of this year, according to the Energy and Clean Air Research Institute.
China is doubling down on its technological ambitions. A top Communist Party meeting in Beijing this week vowed to “greatly expand” the country’s power in science and technology; The Communiqué released at the end of the meeting also talked about the need to increase domestic consumption, but without going into any details.
In one sense, China’s economic strengths and weaknesses are two sides of the same coin. Scott Kennedy, a China expert at the CSIS TAB TANNING tank, and Scott Rozelle, a person at the Stanford Institute, wrote elsewhere “and the roots of some hope, and the roots of hope of another and the same hope.”



