>bond
PRC rates are basically steady and has been for past 10 years, vs US treasuries / bond market undergoing recent yield curve drama. The story isn't PRC bonds are spectacular, but PRC bond/banking is steady vs US whose currently not. The broader point being indicators reflect PRC is doing basically fine, it's not collapsing due to exogenous crisis like western MSM tries to paint. It's doing fine because she's proactively managing economy, including rebalancing problematic sectors. There's a fundmental difference between trying to pour out a 100 alarm fire when your house is ablaze due to negligance vs proactively doing controlled burning to prevent unexpected and potentially said catastrophic blaze. The western media presents the former, to build narrative of collapse. Reality is the latter, aka stable unwinding within economic controls, with comfortable headroom to be in ball park of expected growth of 4-5%, aka essentially still top performing among major economies despite, deliberately amputating parts of itself.
>deflation generally
GENERALLY. There's also analysis on deflation being fine, but it depends on type / cause of deflation. Deflation via improved productivity, i.e. PRC industry being able to bring value down in such analysis is not correlated with depressing economic activity. Especially not to the point of contracting.
>It's certainly not going to be in the league of highly developed countries any time soon.
That's literally the technical definition of high income, of course the western narrative bar is going to moved once PRC reaches technical high income, to but not advanced economy income, but that's officially WB high income. Relative to advacned economy high income, I am the first to state will not happen due to denominator effect, PRC has 600M on 1000rmb per month, aka 40% of the population contributes to 5% of GDP, they're going ot drag down per capita indicators until they die. There's reason Xi's China dream aims for modest IIRC 40k PPP by 2050. But the entire muh high income meme is distraction from broader point that geopolitical competition is about comprehensive national power. PRC doesn't need high per capita income when in aggregate she can outperform, i.e. she's closer to being on par with highly developed US in terms of actual capability than any other "advanced economy" who are frankly to small to even be in the race.
>ridiculous
WTO has preferrential rules if you're a developing country, and PRC enjoys exploiting technicalities. This isn't anything new, when IMF first worked with PRC to agree on per capita income, PRC insisted on 50% lower. PRC has every INCENTIVE to look weaker to multinational institutionals for perks. Current GDP / national accounting grossly deflates input of imputed rent, to the point of knocking 6-8% of GDP. And when PRC smoothes GDP, it under reports as much as it over reports. It should not be surprising PRC games stats to her benefit, but as I said, it's a card with limited shelf life that's ending.
>different kind of trap than middle income trap
No, this is quite literally the central thesis of the middle income trap paper. The TRAP is inability to move up value chains, the pain of the TRAP is being stuck in middle income, because no high value sectors = no high wage. PRC has no issue moving up value chains due to massive high skilled human capita pipeline. At PRC scale, some of PRC will have high value, highish income, somem being multilple advanced countries worth of people. That's enough to escape the industrial trap, but not enough to pull everyone to advanced economic standards. I'm throwing US in the bucket because PRC/US is top 2 rank with 3+ being distant, distant competitor. Very few countries have the aggregate talent pool and ability to coordinate said talent to competently dabble in every sector. Hence US and PRC are least trapped in terms of traps that prevent countries from moving up value chain. The caveate I added is middle income trap is a stupid way to assess economic progress for countries with as many people as PRC (again really PRC and India), because they can have low per capita indicators while in aggregate have significantly more national power. Which TBF the OG paper isn't framed in terms of geopolitical competition, but that's really what people are talking about when they dogwhistle PRC is stuck in middle income - that PRC will have the capabilities of a middle income country, when basically no one else has slight chance of being US peer competitor (as acknowledged by US). Hence PRC, by virtue of having reasonably developed core tech in almost every sector is as trapped as US (aka least trapped) if you apply the actual reasoning of middle income trap in a geopolitical context.