I did read it, but not seeing what this article brings new.
What is the point being made here? Except, things are bad, and nobody realizes it.
The term Zombie Economy has been used for a lot of years, when will it actually manifest?
The US and EU/Eurozone/Western Europe are not going away. Their significant allies are not going away (eg Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, India, etc.). China isn't taking over, they're becoming (have become) a peer global power.
China has accumulated vast wealth, infrastructure, manufacturing, know-how, and so on. It's not going to reverse backwards in the sense of collapse. Things aren't going back to the way they were 30-40 years ago. China is - at least for our relevant time - permanently established as a free-standing power (ie even if the West wanted to, that genie can't be put back). They will likely continue to progress, even if at a slower pace.
Stagnation brought on by hyper rigid authoritarianism is most likely. At least during the Xi era. Perhaps there will be a Deng Xiaoping like loosening again afterward, who knows (maybe someone far worse will use Xi's levers of power to implement even stricter authoritarianism).
In the long term, they have a bit of a population problem as their demographic dividend ends and their birth rate remains low.
It is gonna be real rough soon.
Both are fairly low.
So then after a while if the things keep going on North Korea stops being "that isolated contry"?
Good luck running long term businesses (but some people seem to manage pretty well - survivor bias?) and long term personal or family investments (scary just a bit? - I mean beyond US-style investing?)
Around 30% of the economy is linked to real estate, seems pretty zombified. Export economy is being strangled by increased labour costs/shortages and carefully rolled sanctions. Consumption economy has difficulties to grow due to a lack of "hope in better times" from consumers. But the elephant in the room is the CCP, which is looking more concerned with "political stability" at the expense of everything else.
Things are bad since Xi Jimping first years with first wave of delocalization of (textile) industries, politicization of society, political infightings that target the economy, etc...
Japan is a mild example, but I bet you have much fewer "Made in Japan" things in your house than you would in 1985. Argentina is a much more painful example, with no recovery in sight. Wait what's going to happen when Russia loses the war.
“Collapse” would be Great Depression, or unbailed-out Global Financial Crisis. The GFC (rightly) spooked everyone, but now we’ve got millions of wanna-be prophets in the media trying to predict the next “collapse” and take credit for being a modern day Nostradamus. But it’s all just clickbait.
But less tongue in cheek, this value destruction will end someday. With every cyclic crisis, a ~10% of our population falls into poverty. Maybe the percentages will become smaller every decade, but theres a feudal 99% poverty rock bottom, you can't really go deeper than that.
Japan’s economy arguably collapsed in the 90s. Perhaps burst and stagnated is more accurate ever but its a semantic game at that point. No one knows if China’s economy will collapse but there are lots a serious and unique risks.
The article is saying 'China peaked in 2021 and the past two years have been a zombie economy'. It's not talking about what might happen, but about what has already happened and why the state has been hyper-focusing on security and military competition with the west for the last couple of years.