Specifically: there is not much of a home grown consumer economy; they have driven growth too heavily on exports and infrastructure build, leading to a massive overhang in building, a housing bubble that is teetering dangerously close to unwinding, and a major shortage of domestic consumer demand.
The Chinese people should be richer; the fact that they export a lot is a symptom of the failure to build up the household sector so domestic demand partly balances investment.
Again, read Michael Pettis’s “China Financial Markets” blog at the Carnegie Endowment:
Something must be very wrong in your assessment, right?
I like Michael Pettis's analysis, though I'll grant you that the distortions he cites in the Chinese economy have gone on longer than he predicted possible. But the health of the Chinese economy is not just the visible things you cite, but also the distribution of assets and balance sheets in the economy.
Per Pettis (and other sources), the banking system is dealing with a large debt overhang in society. Pettis's proposed policy fix is to assign that debt to the state, to state-owned-enterprises, or to the corporate sector. Because the long-term growth of China's economy depends on being less reliant on exports, and having a more "normal" mix of domestic demand. There are nuances there, but Pettis does a better job than I do in explaining it.
The trouble is that it's not politically expedient to assign the losses due to (unrealized) bad debt to those entities. And the result is a slow, grinding failure in the housing sector. The government does have a tight lid on dissent, but I understand that the Chinese people are in a more precarious position than they should be due to many households having overinvested in nonproductive real estate projects. How that unwinds will be fascinating to watch, and extremely relevant to world economics and geopolitics.
To be clear, I really am hoping for the best for China and its people. The right policy is sometimes well-known but hard to execute, and that's the tragedy. (It's playing out now, in spectacular style, in the US.)
China exports, per capita, around as much as Tunisia where I am from. It does, however, have a way higher gdp per capita. Per capita, China ranks at 104 far from most developed and developing countries. For some Chinese, exports are their bread and butter but for most Chinese, they are only dealing locally.
This does, in some opinions, explain the surge in their exports. As their internal market (which is their primary market) slowed down, they turned to exports. This might suggest that something is wrong with their economy, however: 1. it's not clear if it is as bad as the 2008 crisis in the US. and 2. the 2008 crisis was bad but not the end of the world. The US had a rather good decade afterward.
China has a serious debt problem in its economy. Not government debt like in the US, but shadow banking debt. My fear, based on reading Pettis primarily, is that the Chinese people will end up paying for that debt. Households that have expensive second homes as investment vehicles will suffer those losses (since there isn't sufficient population to fill those homes), unless those losses are socialized or redistributed.
is there anything I can do to survive from it?
This pre-dates the pandemic by 20 years. There are articles as far back as 2000 that detail the impending collapse Chinese civilisation. To the point where it's now become a meme (the economist are notoriously known for their bad predictions on this subject)
On the one hand you have a bunch of virtual numbers, on the other one you have a large number of top factories, scientists and engineers (they days of copying are long past). You would go with the virtual numbers if you could choose?
Even if finance completely collapses and all money vanishes, they will still have all those real things. Restarting finance from there is far, far easier than the other way around. Too much magical thinking around "money".
PS: I don't like the article though. Lots of... "statements", let's put it that way.
Everyone else?
An interesting thing is that they likely cannot, outside of some exceptional circumstances--which might include the current clownish situation. Lots of countries would like to be among leading economies. But they don't have enough capital, cannot get it on really favorable terms, don't have the know-how, cannot have effective protectionism to start up (blocked by international rules and retaliations).
You can attract foreign capital and corporations, but it's much harder to tie their people and wealth to you permanently. There is a term 'middle income trap' for example. The impressive thing about PRC is how they've had enough power leverage and ability to play into turn-of-Millennium Western establishment's mentality to really push ahead. But there are many countries that couldn't.