No middle-income trap for China

Project China trap PIC - businesstimes.com.sg
Project China trap PIC - businesstimes.com.sg

The days of 10% annual growth for the Chinese economy have ended, as was inevitable. But there is good reason to believe that the real story is not the slowdown, but the shift in Chinese output from quantity to quality. STEPHEN S. ROACH* writes

BEIJING: There has always been a fixation on Chinese economic growth. And with good reason. For a large economy, sustaining annual growth rates of 10% over several decades is unprecedented.

And yet that’s exactly what China did from 1980 to 2011. But now the miracle is over. Since 2012, annual growth has slowed to 7.2 percent, and Premier Li Keqiang’s recent annual “work report” set a growth target of just 6-6.5 percent for 2019.

Editor's Comment
Human rights are sacred

It highlights the need to protect rights such as access to clean water, education, healthcare and freedom of expression.President Duma Boko, rightly honours past interventions from securing a dignified burial for Gaoberekwe Pitseng in the CKGR to promoting linguistic inclusion. Yet, they also expose a critical truth, that a nation cannot sustainably protect its people through ad hoc acts of compassion alone.It is time for both government and the...

Have a Story? Send Us a tip
arrow up