Avoiding The Fall

It is increasingly accepted that China's growth model, which served it very well in the 1980s and 90s, reached its useful limit during the past decade. As a result, although China continued to post spectacular GDP growth numbers, this growth came with a cost - unsustainable imbalances and even faster growth in debt. With China's new generation of leaders formally taking power in early 2013, it clearly must restructure its development model to achieve a very different kind of growth. A Chinese rebalancing is inevitable and the most interesting question is how it will occur. In Restructuring the Chinese Economy, Michael Pettis outlines six paths that China can follow - the only logical paths that lead ultimately to rebalancing - and discusses the political and economic strengths and limitations of each. These paths range from debt crisis and negative growth, at one extreme, to a massive wealth transfer from the state to Chinese households, with steady growth for many years, at the other. How Beijing chooses will determine China's position in the world for the rest of the century.