Chinese President Xi Jinping's first major reform plans a decade ago were also his boldest, envisaging a transition to a Western-style free-market economy driven by services and consumption by 2020, Joe Cash reported for Reuters.
The failure to restructure the world's second-largest economy has raised questions about what comes next for China.
The 60-point agenda was meant to fix a growth model better suited to less developed countries, but most of those reforms have gone nowhere, and reliance on older policies has only worsened China's massive debt pile and industrial overcapacity.
The failure to restructure the world's second-largest economy has raised questions about what comes next for China.
When the global financial crisis hit in 2008-2009, China had already met its investment needs.
Since then, the economy quadrupled in nominal terms while overall debt expanded nine times. To keep growth high, China in the 2010s doubled down on infrastructure and property investment, at the expense of household consumption.
While many analysts see a slow drift toward Japan-style stagnation as the most likely outcome, there is also the prospect of a more severe crunch.
"Things always fail slowly until they suddenly break," said William Hurst, Chong Hua Professor of Chinese Development at the University of Cambridge.
"There is a significant risk in the short term of financial crisis or another degree of economic crisis that would carry very substantial social and political costs for the Chinese government. Eventually, there's going to have to be a reckoning," Liangping Gao and Kevin Yao also reported for Reuters.
Comments