Jeff J. Brown
Associate Editor, The Greanville Post
Editor in Chief, China Rising
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CHINA IS COLLAPSING! HOW DO I KNOW? BECAUSE THE WALL STREET JOURNAL SAYS SO AND THEY’RE THE EXPERTS, RIGHT? CHINA RISING RADIO SINOLAND 250109
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This is Jeff J. Brown, China Rising Radio Sinoland, Seeks Truth From Facts Foundation, China Writers’ Group, Bioweapon Truth Commission and China Tech News Flash.
A good friend of mine just sent me an article that came out the first week of 2025 in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) entitled: “China’s Economy is Burdened by Years of Excess. Here’s how bad it really is.” I’ll include this article for you at the end. You’re welcome to look at it.
Two salient falsities. First, China is the world’s #2 economy? This masturbatory shibboleth wore out its tread years ago. The World Bank and IMF officially announced in 2014 that China had the world’s #1 (PPP-purchasing power parity) economy, to wit,
In 2023, China generated twice as much electricity as the US, produced 12.6 times as much steel and 22 times as much cement. China’s shipyards accounted for over 50% of the world’s output, while US production was negligible. In 2023, China produced 30,200,000 vehicles, almost 3 times more than the 10,600,000 made in the US. On the demand side, 26,000,000 vehicles were sold in China last year, 68% more than the 15,500,000 sold in the US. Chinese consumers bought 434,000,000 smartphones, 3 times the 144,000,000 sold in the US.
As a country, China consumes twice as much meat and 8 times as much seafood as the US. Chinese shoppers spend twice as much on luxury goods as American shoppers. In 2023, Chinese travelers took 620,000,000 flights, 25% fewer than the 819,000,000 flights taken by Americans. But Chinese travelers also took 3,000,000,000 trips on high-speed trains, and 685,000,000 on traditional rail, significantly more than the 28,000,000 Amtrak trips(https://chinarising.puntopress.com/2024/08/01/westerners-delusions-about-their-economic-superiority-keep-them-from-making-changes-for-the-better-and-only-make-their-futures-worse-walk-down-a-chinese-street-to-see-why-china-rising-radi/).
Secondly, the WSJ’s chart on supposed debt as a percentage of GDP has no references at all, because there are no numbers to support it. They can’t reference it, since it’s a lie and everything else in this hit piece is a lie. Further on, I’ll explain how it’s done. I know, because I have been reporting on this, going back to at least 2015.
In June of 2024, I wrote an article and did a podcast: “No recession in 48 years, no real estate bubble since 1949, yet Sinophobes keep praying for a China crash. It will never happen. WHY?(https://chinarising.puntopress.com/2024/06/10/no-recession-in-48-years-no-real-estate-bubble-since-1949-yet-sinophobes-keep-praying-for-a-china-crash-it-will-never-happen-why-china-rising-radio-sinoland-240610/).
Read the article as to why there has not been a recession in China in 48 years, nor a real estate bubble since 1949. During this same time frame, look what has happened to the economies in the West and the rest of the world, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan Province: rigged booms, busts, recessions and real estate bubbles nonstop since World War II, especially 1988, 1997, 2000 and 2008. The Chinese didn’t even stop to catch their breath during these global financial meltdowns that devastated much the rest of humanity. Let these facts and timelines sink in for a while.
If Mainland Chinese have not had a recession in 48 years and they have had no real estate bubble since 1949, why would they have either or both now? How is today more precarious than 1959, 1969, 1979, 1989, 1999, 2009 and 2019, when China’s economy was/is five, 10, 20 times bigger, more dynamic and advanced than 48 years ago, or back in 1949? Why? Why would they have crashes now? The answer is in my article, which you will not see in the West’s Big Lie Propaganda Machine (BLPM), like the WSJ, nor will I win the Nobel Prize in Economics for telling you the truth.
Here’s another one I wrote in April 2024: “Baba Beijing is on the warpath to make banks, finance, big tech and social media serve the people and better their lives. The West not!”(https://chinarising.puntopress.com/2024/04/13/baba-beijing-is-on-the-war-path-to-make-banks-finance-big-tech-and-social-media-serve-the-people-and-better-their-lives-the-west-not-china-rising-radio-sinoland-2404012/).
The Chinese government, which I call Baba Beijing, has proctoscopes the size of Hubble Telescopes up the backsides of every bank in China, even though 99.9% of them are people-owned. Fintech, hedge funds, big tech and social media are equally scrutinized. They cannot pass gas without having to be ready, at any moment, to justify to Baba Beijing their use of information, how they’re going to structure their businesses, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. When you have that kind of benevolent oversight, which is truly looking out for the best interests of their people, how are you going to have financial disasters in an economy and a society like that?
Here’s two I wrote/recorded September 2023 and November 2022. “China is going to collapse! Not really. Here’s why it cannot happen.” (https://chinarising.puntopress.com/2023/09/16/china-is-going-to-collapse-not-really-heres-why-it-cannot-happen-china-rising-radio-sinoland-230916/), and China’s real estate sector is a bursting bubble! Collapse here we come! REALLY? China Rising Radio Sinoland 221121 (https://chinarising.puntopress.com/2022/11/21/chinas-real-estate-sector-is-a-bursting-bubble-collapse-here-we-come-really-china-rising-radio-sinoland-221121/).
I spell it out. Read these articles. They’re not long and you can opt to listen to the audio or watch the videos.
Hasn’t happened, will not happen. A big reason why? Land in China is not available to be bought privately. Nobody can buy private dirt in China. If McDonald’s wants to build a restaurant in Beijing, they can get a fungible, 75-year lease on that property. Not to mention that the renewal terms are very favorable for the lessee. Ditto residential real estate. If I want to buy an apartment or house in China, I can get a fungible lease on it for 75 years, however I cannot buy the dirt. Nobody can buy the dirt. If the land or the dirt is publicly owned by the people, how can you have a real estate collapse? This is not robber baron, BlackRock piracy preying on the citizens. You cannot compare China’s communist-socialist markets to the neoliberal, for-the-1% West.
It’s not just the banks and land in Mainland China. Imagine McDonnell Douglas, BAE, Dassault and Raytheon, for military hardware – all of their equivalents in China are 100% owned by the people. Boeing and Airbus. The Chinese versions of Boeing and Airbus are owned by the people. T-Mobile, Sprint, Vodafone, Orange. Telephone companies are all owned by the people in China. All the major mining companies. Imagine BHP, Glencore and Rio Tinto. All of them are owned by the people. United Airlines, Lufthansa, KLM, Delta, Southwest Airlines. All of those in China are owned by the people. ExxonMobil, British Petroleum, Shell, Total. All of those oil companies in China are owned by the people. All of the highways, toll roads, airports, post offices, trains and tracks, ports, shipping companies, they’re all owned by the people. There are no private electricity, water and gas utilities in China. They’re all owned by the people. No privatized nuclear sector. It’s all owned by the people.
Imagine Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan, imagine all those banks owned by the people. Also, US Steel, ArcelorMittal, all the major steel companies and huge swaths of manufacturing and industry. That’s the way it is in Mainland China. NASA, the European Space Agency and Elon Musk’s Starlink, their equivalents are all owned by the people in Mainland China.
The equivalents of CNN, MSNBC, BBC, the Washington Post, New York Times, Bloomberg, UPI and AP are all owned by the people in China. Even more amazing, China has for its media and social media, a person who is the official censor. This goes back 2,000 years that they’ve been doing this. The people can write him and complain and bitch and moan about why this is being published and why that is not being published. And he has to answer the citizenry.
Imagine Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok being heavily monitored for the benefit of the people and not for the benefit of the powerful. That is what happens in China. There are public agencies that watch over all of this to make sure that the people, the 99% are getting a fair deal, not the 1%. The reality is that China’s massive, private, big tech companies – some of the biggest corporations in the world – are effectively under state supervision: Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, Sina Weibo and many others you’ve never heard of. The people heartily endorse this oversight, because they trust Baba Beijing to do right by them.
More of my previous articles/podcasts on the subject: here’s one from June 2022, A run on Chinese banks? Don’t believe the West’s Big Lie Propaganda Machine. It can’t happen, since the citizens own them all. China Rising Radio Sinoland 220622 (https://chinarising.puntopress.com/2022/06/23/a-run-on-chinese-banks-dont-believe-the-wests-big-lie-propaganda-machine-it-cant-happen-since-the-citizens-own-them-all-china-rising-radio-sinoland-220622/).
Oh, there’s about 10 or 15 that are private banks. They’re minuscule and looked upon as financial sector lab rats. The central People’s Bank of China (PBOC) is owned by the citizens. China mints its own money. The government does not pay interest on its own debt, like the privately owned Federal Reserve in the United States, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
As far back as 2015, I was interviewed by Mo Dawoud on Wall St. for Main St. (http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2015/07/05/jeff-j-brown-44-days-radio-sinoland-interviewed-on-wall-st-for-main-st/). In 2017, I was guest with Kenneth Amadori on his Crush the Street Show (http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2017/03/22/crush-the-streets-kenneth-ameduri-interviews-china-rising-radio-sinolands-jeff-j-brown-170323/). Back then, I was already alerting all the Western chicken littles. They didn’t like what I had to say because they are neoliberal capitalists, which I fully respect.
The reason that the Wall Street Journal published the referenced article is more than likely, it was paid by the US government to do so. This, via the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), or one of George Soros’s thousands of CIA-Mossad front groups. The West’s BLPM spends billions of dollars and euros to vomit fake news about China all over the global MSM. In 2021, the US Congress budgeted $1.5 billion for five years in a “Countering Chinese Influence Fund” to globally fight the so-called “malign influence” of China.
That is $300 million a year, a million dollars a day. Then just four months ago, in September 2024, Congress passed another bill for $1.6 billion for another five years to counter so-called “Chinese influence”. The bill that was passed is called “Countering the People’s Republic of China Malign Influence Fund”, to pay media and civil society groups like George Soros and NED, as well as all imperial-colonial foundations and trusts, to spread negative views and opinions on China—basically, to lie through their teeth. Just one tiny example: in May of 2022, it was found out – this is going on many thousands of times a year all over the world – in Zimbabwe, the US embassy was caught paying $1,000 per article to fabricate lies in national newspapers and magazines to trash China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
Thus, everything you see, read, and hear about China in Western media, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan Province is a paid-for lie. They are getting paid by US taxpayers to lie to you about China.
This is why the aforementioned WSJ article states that Chinese debt as a percentage of GDP is greater than the United States. It’s a complete and total lie. Even the World Bank and the IMF don’t agree with that, not to mention the bogus “USA is #1” cliché. Other chicken-little, fear mongering sub-headings include: Historic Loss Of Wealth, Debt, Real Estate, Destiny Deferred, Ticking Time Bomb, Excesses All Around, and Industrial Overcapacity. Oh my God!
We’re living in Taiwan Province, of which I have already done over 15 short written, audiovisual reports (www.chinarising.puntopress.com/search/?q=ladyb). They remind me that an economy does not have to be communist-socialist to do well for its people. Taiwan is mostly capitalist and the 99% benefit greatly. You just have to have a government that cares about the people and not the 1%.
Thus, every time someone tells you how China is crashing and burning and dying, it’s a lie. We were in Mainland China for the first two weeks in December, as well as a total of three months over the last 1.5 years, traveling to mostly smaller cities and rural areas. It’s jaw dropping and breathtaking. It’s hard to conceptualize what’s going on in the People’s Republic of China, unless you go there and see it for yourself, although I do my best in my work to convey the reality on the ground. That’s why all these new visa regulations that China is allowing now, letting everybody visit for two weeks to 30 days with no visa, is the smartest thing, as far as China’s soft power.
Now, YouTube, Rumble, Brighteon, Bitchute, and Odyssey are packed with videos of people reporting, “I can’t describe what I just saw in China. I was there for two weeks. IT’S UNBELIEVABLE!” And that’s exactly the truth.
Having lived, worked and traveled all over the country for 16 years (1990-1997 and 2010-2019: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B00TX0TDDI/allbooks), Westerners cannot fathom how democratic Mainland China truly is for the 99%, which greatly helps explain its economic success, resilience and innovation. You simply cannot compare its for-the-99% communist-socialist economy and society to the West’s aristocratic, kakocratic, authoritarian governance that serves the 1%. Now, hundreds of thousands of foreigners are finding out for themselves.
Will this be the last article that I write, comparing China and the West? Probably not. First, American taxpayers are paying the BLPM a million dollars a day to vomit lies about China across the planet. As well, the vast majority of Westerners and their vassals adamantly refuse to admit that the Chinese’s never-before-seen-in-human-history, communist-socialist success story is leaving in the dust imperialist-colonialist, neoliberal capitalism and its peoples around the world. Westerners can incorrectly and inappropriately tar and feather China with their empty, oxymoronic “Marxist Wokeism”, “cultural Marxism”, “spiritual Marxism”, “market Marxism” and “political Marxism” slogans. Yet, the Chinese people can’t be bothered. They are marching into the 22nd century with heads high, overcoming internal and external challenges, while smiling all the way to their people-owned banks and land.
This is Jeff J. Brown China Rising Radio Sinoland signing out. Have a wonderful day.
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China’s economy today is burdened with excess: Millions of empty or unfinished apartment blocks, trillions of dollars in debt straining local governments and ballooning industrial production driving an export surge that is igniting trade tensions worldwide. China still has strengths: It dominates global manufacturing and has commanding positions in new technologies, such as electric vehicles and renewable energy. Policymakers have proven adept at handling past crises, and are readying bold new stimulus to support the economy. Nonetheless, the scale of the excesses plaguing China’s economy underscores the perilous position Beijing finds itself in as a new trade war looms. China’s property meltdown has since 2021 destroyed around $18 trillion of Chinese household wealth, according to an estimate by Barclays, eclipsing the losses suffered by Americans in the financial crash of 2008-09. That hit, along with the trauma of Beijing’s heavy-handed response to the Covid-19 pandemic, helps explain why Chinese consumers aren’t spending freely. Debt: Borrowing by government, households and corporations in China is approaching 300% of its annual GDP. “Hidden” borrowing by local governments—debt held off the books on their behalf by opaque investment companies known as local government financing vehicles—is a major problem. On some measures, the scale of those debts and the burden of servicing them in China is more severe than in the U.S. before the financial crisis or in Europe in the depths of its own debt crisis a decade ago. Real estate: China’s real-estate boom was unprecedented—and so is the ongoing bust. New construction and sales have cratered since the government took steps to rein in the bubble in 2020. It has struggled to stabilize the market, despite measures to ease purchase restrictions and offer cheap credit to would-be buyers. One sign of the boom’s excesses: There are as many as around 80 million vacant units in China, according to the latest estimates at the end of November, equivalent to half the total housing stock of the entire U.S. Destiny deferred China’s rapid growth meant that for years forecasters expected China to overtake the U.S. as the world’s largest economy. As recently as 2019, some forecasters were expecting China’s GDP to eclipse the U.S.’s around 2030. Today, it is the U.S. powering the global economy and China that is battling stumbling growth. Few now expect China to catch up with the U.S. before midcentury, if it manages to at all. China is also facing demographic headwinds that will make it harder to restore its economic vigor. China’s working-age population is shrinking, reversing the demographic dividend that powered its economic ascent. China’s economy has for decades been powered by heady levels of investment. At first, that yielded modern infrastructure and propelled the expansion of China’s manufacturing engine and its megacities. But sticking with that strategy year after year has meant China today is beset by colossal debts, unneeded apartments and industrial overcapacity. Industrial overcapacity: In response to the slowing economy, and to transform China into a technological colossus, leader Xi Jinping has been funneling investment into China’s already huge factory sector. The result has been a surge in industrial capacity and two years of falling prices for Chinese producers, which are increasingly looking overseas to find buyers for goods they can’t sell at home. That is sparking trade spats with the U.S.-led West and emerging markets such as Brazil and India. Write to Jason Douglas at ja***********@ws*.com and Ming Li at mi*****@ws*.comChina’s Economy Is Burdened by Years of Excess. Here’s How Bad It Really Is.
China’s Economy Is Burdened by Years of Excess. Here’s How Bad It Really Is. ©.
Historic loss of wealth
Ticking time bomb
Excesses all around
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JEFF J. BROWN, Senior Editor & China Correspondent, Dispatch from Beijing
Jeff J. Brown is a geopolitical analyst, journalist, lecturer and the author of The China Trilogy. It consists of 44 Days Backpacking in China - The Middle Kingdom in the 21st Century, with the United States, Europe and the Fate of the World in Its Looking Glass (2013); Punto Press released China Rising - Capitalist Roads, Socialist Destinations (2016); and for Badak Merah, Jeff authored China Is Communist, Dammit! – Dawn of the Red Dynasty (2017).
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1 comment
But the privately owned media/government propaganda mills lie about the whole world, not just China (though its strength is an attraction for them).
One could enumerate all the countries they lie about, Russia, Iran, Africa, Europe, Israel etc. etc. Nothing is real that one hears reads or sees on the main meda. Even the reportage within the US itself is all lies. We live in an artificial universe, where even professionals are to be distrusted (politicos are by nature totally unreliable). Such a distortion of reality breeds robots and rots away the res publica.
BTW The high production of cars is not so much to be admired, but an efficient public transport system is.