It is easy to imagine China’s economic freight train going off the rails. When I came to Asia 14 years ago, many people in Japan, where the economy was then three times the size of China’s in nominal terms, were predicting precisely that. Surely, they reasoned, the system must crumble under its own contradictions.
It was, after all, a state-managed economy prone to misallocation of capital and dependent on wasteful investment. It had a repressive political apparatus that spent more on internal security than on national defence.
Anger was growing at Communist party officials, many of whom were neck deep in corruption and engaged in land grabbing on an epic scale. Crudely measured, the economy was churning out astonishing growth. Yet it was poisoning the air, the water and, not infrequently, China’s own citizens.