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Comment by AFascistWorld | Hacker News Reader

China hasn't had a financial crisis for 40 years, I wonder how long they can last, and how well their ubiquitous multi-million dollar condos would fare; or can they prove again that nothing communists can't tackle, and capitalism with Chinese characteristics are indeed immune to self-correction.

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Is that really accurate? China was heavily hit by the Asian financial crisis, even if not as bad as the rest of Asia. The aftermath of Tiananmen wasn’t so great either. The early 00s was a crazy time as well, with bubbles forming and popping fairly rapidly. They had to recapitalize the banks afterwards, as well as nationalize most of their bad debt.

I guess it really depends on your definition of financial crisis.

Not true. In late 90s there is a severe internal financial crisis in China, many people get laid off from state-run enterprises.

It is just that China isn't a significant focus of the world or West at that moment so it barely gets noticed.

China has had plenty of those. But their levers are different. They actively overspend on infrastructure projects to stimulate the economy whenever there was a downturn.

In the past, that worked really well, spending to hand money to the poor who improved their standards of living. Will this work in the future? Nobody knows.

One can say that as now the second largest economy, China didn't cause financial crisis in the 40 years of opening up, outside crises didn't trigger significant slowdown, part of the immunity is that China just has so many easy ways to simply write it off.

Why stop at 40 years? By that definition, China hasn’t had a financial crisis for the last 70 years, at least.

It's a pretty hot take to suggest that counter-cyclical spending isn't a very strong response to recessions - this is classical economics in a nutshell. Just because the US is too politically paralyzed to spend at the same level doesn't mean that it's an ineffectual tool.

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