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This Broken China Ping might get a bit long. There is a lot going on to unpack. This update will be long on economics and short on politics.
As many of you have noticed, there is great turmoil in the PRC economy. The most public part is the ongoing unraveling of the Housing Industry in China driven by the unfolding debt crisis. Of the top 50 Real Estate developers in the PRC, 34 are currently in at least technical default. The 16 survivors are facing $1.5B US in debt payments this month (September). These top 50 developers have approximately an additional $600B US in accounts payable to vendors. I doubt that more than 2/3 will ever be paid.
The price of new, i.e. pre-construction, housing units is falling. For August it was down 1.5% year-on-year. This wouldn't be so bad except that last August it was down 28.3% YOY. The housing resale market is thin in the major and secondary cities. It is VERY thin outside these cities.
The rise of Rotten-tale (abandoned) construction projects is leaving purchasers with no hope of receiving the housing they purchased while leaving them with mortgages to pay back to the banks. Some have been already paying on these mortgages for seven years. This is leading to a rise in mortgage loan defaults further destabilizing the banking industry.
Now add in the widespread availability of nearly completed housing. People are starting to just find a unit they like and finish it themselves whether they own it or not and live there for free. There are whole empty cities scattered around China.
So what is driving this? There is a simple one word answer: Demographics.
Historically, the single greatest driver in a nation's life or death is demographics. The second is national resources. China's history is replete with great cycles of population growth and collapse. Growth when there is good weather and peace (and damn little of that) followed by contraction caused by famine and/or war. The past 75 years have been among the best in Chinese history even with the famine caused by the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the One Child Policy. That is coming to an end.
Time out for a minor economic history lesson.
The single greatest advance in human history occurred with the start of the Industrial Revolution in Britain in the late 18th Century. Britain took close to seven generations to industrialize. They were the first and had to invent everything as they went. The US took five generations. Everyone else took less. The longer it took, the easier the societal adjustment. China did it in less than one generation. As a result, Britain, the US, and western Europe had the time to adjust and develop the economic consumption side in order to maintain the economic gains while mostly mitigating the social disruption. The big problem with using industrialization as a driver for your economy is that you only get to do it ONCE.
For those who would like a graphical representation of the change you can click here.
It shows the increase in world GDP over the past 2000 years. I moved the start date to 1700 but you can move it back. You will notice that the bulk of the growth has been since 1950 with the introduction of the Bretton Woods System. (Again, brought to you by the US Navy).
Bretton Woods allowed almost every nation to industrialize. Pre BW, if a country wanted to industrialize it had to have natural resources, capital, workers, technology, consumers, transportation systems, and a cooperative government. Post BW, a nation could trade its resources for what it lacked and then sell its production to consumers in other nations. This is exactly what China did. It imported raw material and sold finished products.
Sustainable economic development is a sequential process of market creation. No matter how late a nation starts its development it must repeat earlier stages to succeed. You cannot just skip it, jump forward directly from agricultural, primitive method of production to modern automobile assembly line. If you do that it is not sustainable. Henry Ford paid his workers more than other industrialists not because he was a good guy but because he wanted his workers to be able to buy the cars he was making. He created a market for what he sold. You can see what that did for the US economy.
The biggest thing the Industrial Revolution did was to decouple national wealth from military conquest. When there is damn little for everyone the only way to get more is to take it from someone else. To their everlasting glory, Britain and the US invented the ability to MAKE money where there was none before. Wealth creation became a function of technology advance and trade rather than conquest.
This feat is all the more impressive when you consider that world per-capita GDP has increased at the same time as the greatest population expansion in world history. The poorest in America live almost as well as the nobility of England did 500 years ago.
I hear you muttering, "OK, LP, how does this relate to what's going on in China?"
Good question. The PRC has failed to develop a large enough consumer base to hold on to the economic gains as the pace of industrialization slackens. They tried to skip steps. The CCP, has refused to permit enough personal independence to allow for the innovation necessary. The PRC is dependent on other nations for innovation, materials, markets, and FOOD. Their demographic collapse, for that is what it is, will mean that there will be NO soft landing for the PRC economy. This is about as bold a prediction as you will ever see me make.
I think that's enough for today. I've used my economics degree more in the past month and a half writing these updates to y'all than I have in the past 45 years.
WWG1WGA
Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)