Episode 2718 - September 5 - Tiếng Anh - Tại sao Trung Quốc rất khó để cải thiện nền kinh tế ốm yếu của mình - Vina Technology at AI time

Why It’s So Hard for China to Fix Its Ailing Economy New York Times. September 3, 2024. In 2004, as China’s economy was emerging as a global force, a group of researchers started conducting nationwide surveys asking Chinese people if they were better off financially than they were five years earlier. The percentage who felt wealthier climbed when surveyed five years later and again in 2014, when it reached a high of 77 percent. Last year, when respondents were asked the same question, that figure dropped to 39 percent. The results of that survey, titled “Getting Ahead in Today’s China: From Optimism to Pessimism,” speak to a new reality. China’s economy is confronting a crisis unlike any it has experienced since it opened its economy to the world more than four decades ago. The post-Covid rebound that was supposed to bring the economy roaring back to life was more like a whimper. A few years ago, Beijing resolved to ween its economy from its dependence on an overheated real estate market, a sector that had underpinned the savings of families as well as China’s banking sector and local government finances. Now, the property sector is in crisis. Developers collapsed, leaving behind huge debts, a trail of failed investments, unsold apartments and lost jobs. Chinese consumers, already prone to saving heavily, have become even more frugal. Businesses that endured the crippling impact of draconian Covid measures have cut salaries and scaled back hiring. Millions of college graduates joining the job market are facing long odds and poor prospects. And China’s population has shrunk two years in a row. In a country where the majority of people had only known the economy to grow rapidly and living conditions to improve, confidence is eroding. Sherry Yang opened her business in 2006 making store signs, billboards and posters in Sichuan Province in southwestern China. Within a few years, local firms were placing so many orders that Ms. Yang had 16 employees and her printing machines were running around the clock. But the business has never fully recovered after Covid, she said. This summer, already sluggish demand worsened; sales in July fell 70 percent from a year earlier. Ms. Yang said it felt like every industry was struggling and no one was spending. Ms. Yang is down to six employees, many of whom spend the day scrolling their phones because there isn’t enough work. “This has been the most difficult year since our opening,” she said. Consumer spending, which Chinese authorities have identified as an important driver of growth, remains weak across the economy. Alibaba, China’s biggest e-commerce firm, said sales in its domestic online shopping business fell 1 percent in the spring. China’s summer movie box office sales have dropped by almost half over last year, according to Maoyan, an entertainment data provider. The U.S. Department of Agriculture forecast in August that Chinese consumers would cut back on buying pork and shift to cheaper beef, because of economic pressures. A number of foreign firms that once rushed into China to catch a rising tide are now retrenching. Last month, the beauty retailer Sephora, an arm of the French luxury group LVMH, announced that it was cutting jobs because of “the challenging market.” IBM is shutting its two research and development centers in China. And policymakers trying to respond are hindered because they cannot rely on a principal fix that worked in the past. For years, local governments borrowed money for splashy development projects that kept people working and the construction sector booming — even if there wasn’t an actual need for that much infrastructure. But the debt from that borrowing, often funneled through opaque funding channels, has ballooned to more than $7 trillion. With investors already jittery about China’s financial system, the days of lavish borrowing for vanity infrastructure are unlikely to return anytime soon. The Chinese government has signaled its alarm by restricting