In economic terms, how is this sustainable?
I guess with a government like they have you have greater possibilities to cover up and postpone the effects, but who knows how this will manifest. I'm hesitant to believe any current scenarios painted by western "experts" because they have basically been wrong for the past decade, but every time they're like "but this time it's for real!"
The only real risk here currency revulsion. At some point there is a risk that nobody will want the currency. But the risk of internal revulsion is low. Chinese citizens have to pay taxes and many other kinds of fees and fines in the currency. They have no choice. External revulsion is a threat but here again the Chinese have opted to buy out their external dependencies. This is why China wants to own all that farmland in Brazil. It never wants to find itself in a situation where it must buy dollars in order to buy soybeans and other critical food stuffs.
People will go on and on about China's sovereign debt. They just don't get it. This is basic MMT (modern monetary theory). The bigger risk for China is that they grow too slowly not that they grow too fast.
Inflation must be kept in check or bad things happen.
Maybe the current levels are sustainable. But not all increases in deficit are sustainable.
At some point, particularly given the last 40 years of evidence to the contrary, people need to simply accept that monetary expansion does not "cause" inflation [1]. Inflation is not a monetary phenomenon at all. Inflation is a price level [2] phenomenon largely driven by trade imbalances. Inflation is about market power, or what some call pricing power. The common case here, btw, is when your external partners from whom you need to import critical goods get even a little bit pricing power then you will get inflation. China is seeking to own all its externals and deliberately suppress any such pricing power not driven by its own banks.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-22/the-great...
From where I sit, the past 40 year have shown that, if you grow the money supply only a little bit faster than the real economy grows, then you only get a little bit of inflation.
It still requires them to get many other rich countries to generally buy into their story.
Where do you think your iPhone is built?
I mean, I suppose they can all imagine that spherical cows exist, but wishing won't make it so.
The “they keep predicting economic collapse” is a huge red herring used by pro Chinese media to discredit western media who never made such claims out of a few fringe elements like Gordon Chang.
This? It’s not sustainable. Sooner or later this will result in a correction. This could range from aggressive budgetary measures, an internal crisis all the way to China monetising its overseas investments (which are extremely extensive).
(Ireland had some problems just after the crunch but a) entirely because they took on a bank they could have let fail and b) they’ve paid that off now.)
Going back to my original point: if increasing your revenue faster than increasing your interest payments, you can do this forever. Sure, the credit crunch gave some countries a shock, but you really should read up on exactly how egregious the Greek borrowing situation was. It was insanely unsustainable. Germany, Denmark, Sweden, France, Slovenia? They'll be fine.
China has not that problem. The only danger for China is inflation (that can be controlled with, for instance, taxes), otherwise, the People's Bank of China can buy directly the debt and nothing would happen. In fact, they could just stop emitting debt, but that would be inconvenient for banks and other big investors.
Private and local government debts is a different issue.
The EU should do everything in its power to end the unfair dollar hegemony.
There is a limit to the total rate of government spending - spending beyond the rate of the economy's ability to produce - which causes hyperinflation. That is unrelated to the deficit though (theoretically it could even happen in surplus e.g. if you destroyed all your factories and farms).
The real threat is Tasmania: haven't you seen the wargames maps? We need those US-Chinese troops to fight back against the daemon armies from cradle mountain.
Its a really bad argument. As long as we are happy to export tertiary education and then proffer immigration channels, there is no basis to argue the Chinese polity wants to invade: it can get people here legally, for good benefit both sides.
Pleae, don't feed the racist troll. The chinese are not swamping us and they cannot cause earthquakes by jumping up and down at the same time.
The point of the parent's reference isn't to a lack of actual space, it's to Germany's complaint in the 1930s of not having enough Lebensraum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum
... which was similarly spurious -- the Germans had plenty of room for their population too. Lebensraum wasn't about actual space, it was about imperalism, about the Germans feeling strong enough to grab territory from their neighbors just because they could. One could be forgiven for looking at China's military expansionism in the South China Sea, for instance, and thinking the Chinese polity is feeling the same way.
Lebensraum was a manufactured need of political expediency and an explicitly expansionist act. The South China Sea is not lebensraum, its open-fishing rights, and over-flight and sailing rights, and mineral rights. It's also a vision of a defensive ring.
You know, that domino theory we used to be sold about chinese expansionist policy in S.E. Asia? its being played in reverse: they need this barrier, because we are trying to re-apply opium war logic to opening chinese capital investment markets, and land in China...
the other reference is to turn-by-turn games of war on maps (I think)
Even in the US, "lowering the printing speed, which is high", is considered a ""tightening""