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tokai

My takeaway from this is that China's GDP is being held up by government investments and subsidies.

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OR.

Are they cleaning up their environment. Like actually doing what we only 'talk' about.

Remember a few years ago when Beijing was all smog and smoke. Universally condemned for such bad air quality?

Now they do something about it, to be better, and the 'right' is "it's just government subsidies, wish we could still pollute our environment like the good old days".

I remember in the early 90s in China. Buildings got deliveries of coal to burn for their boilers. Out during a rainstorm in Beijing I came inside literally dirty with black soot (either the rain had nucleated around the soot particles, or it washed them out of the air).

there is no magic, the manufacture industry caused lots of environmental damage and they are just fixing it now, the way out probably be nuclear plants, and the new coal plants are said to be much more cleaner(I'm not sure). US in general is much less polluted as far as I can tell.

China's ongoing industrialization is so immense, that any and all forms of energy are desirable - coal, natural gas, nuclear, solar, wind, hydro - all are being built as fast as they can be.

> China leads the world in constructing new solar and new wind, while also building more coal plants than any other country, the report finds.

https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-building-...

The west cleaned up the environment 50 years ago.

China is just about getting started.

This is the normal development. As countries lift themselves out of poverty, pollution doesn't become a priority until they reach a certain prosperity level.

To put this in perspective, according to Macrotrends on GDP per capita (not adjusting for purchasing power parity, I assume) China is now at the point that the US was in 1980, and in 2014 was at the place the US was in 1974.

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/gdp-...

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/CHN/china/gdp-per-capi...

Is not it similar in the west as well? If governments start cutting their budget deficits and subsidies, I assume we are going to have a lot of problems.

Tesla and spacex would go under.

I think the corn subsidies ended a few years ago, but I’m not in that industry enough to know what the fallout was.

Would be interesting to know.

Yeah almost all countries would have issues if the state just closed. This is about green energy subsidies.

In a shallow way, and ignoring the degree, yes, they are similar.

The US's $34 trillion deficit would like a word.

Just take a look at how much debt was added since the debt ceiling was lifted.

For context: The US's debt to GDP ratio was 96% in 2023

China's debt to GDP ratio was 288%

This is often repeated but is actually completely wrong.

China's government debt to GDP is 77%, vs 121% for the US : https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/GG_DEBT_GDP@GDD/CHN/...

The numbers you posted are the US's federal government debt to GDP and Chinas total overall debt to GDP (including private debts such as mortgages). The two numbers are obviously not comparable at all.

My understanding is that analysts frequently include not just the debts of China's central government, but also all of the provinces, which are much much more heavily indebted. Under the argument that the Chinese central government is going to cover their provinces' debts in a pinch. (Not defending the specific numbers quoted by OP, just a general observation)

The 77% is total government debt, which includes provincial and local government debt - national government debt is only about 10% of GDP. The 280% figure includes corporate and household debt.

Ah! Thanks for correcting me. I only did a short amount of Google searching

That's US gov debt vs PRC gov aggregate debt.

US aggregate debt to GDP is 730%.

Just look at how much was wiped away by inflation during covid. Every year 3-4% of the national debt simply disappears due to inflation. When inflation is higher, even more disappears.

I don't have numbers to oppose, but do yours take in account that the government is paying interests on its debt ?

This. Basically this is the new civic projects spending.

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