How China's doomsayers failed for two decades - Arthur Kroeber

Arthur Kroeber

Renowned China expert Arthur Kroeber, author of China's Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know®, uses the final edition of the China Economic Quarterly (CEQ) to rub it in. Many journalists and other analysts made a living predicting China's demise over the past two decades. Kroeber explains why those predictions failed, and not China itself, in the South China Morning Post.

The South China Morning Post:

In the magazine’s final edition, editor Arthur Kroeber said that all those who had predicted a collapse of the Chinese economy since the Deng Xiaoping days of the 1990s had been proved wrong because they failed to see the resilience of its financial system. 

Kroeber also said China’s one-party “authoritarian politics” was not strangling economic growth. Even Chinese President Xi Jinping, the most powerful Chinese leader since Deng, “seems more interested in creating a resilient governance system that will outlive him than in making China his personal fief”, he said. 

And the ruling Communist Party as a whole has “proved itself surprisingly adaptable to new conditions”. 

“China will keep defying the sceptics and keep on growing, and its influence will grow too,” Kroeber wrote. 

But he added that a “Chinese century” was unlikely to emerge because China still lacked military allies and soft power.

More in the South China Morning Post. (And why the CEQ stops after twenty years)

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