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China’s Economic Crossroads

Given China's failure to follow through on the marketization policies that it announced seven years ago, it is reasonable to be suspicious of the government's latest reform push. Much will depend on what Chinese leaders fear more: disruptive change, or a creeping malaise of their own making.

BRISBANE/NEW YORK – Back in 2013, the Chinese government laid out a policy agenda that promised real reforms to an economy laden with debt and distorted by the influence of the country’s large state-owned enterprise (SOE) sector. But instead of seeing that agenda through, China chose to dodge the risks entailed by marketization, and has since reverted to what it knows best: state control over the economy and the semblance of stability that comes with it.

Since 2017, The China Dashboard, a joint project of the Asia Society Policy Institute and the Rhodium Group, has been tracking China’s economic policies. Having analyzed objective data across ten critical spheres of the country’s economy, we find that China’s reforms have been tepid to nonexistent over the past three years.

The Chinese government’s failure to deliver on its promise of a more open economy has undermined its credibility, and fueled the growing global backlash that it is experiencing today. Even before COVID-19 arrived, the lack of reform had sapped China’s economic performance and made it persistently over-reliant on debt, leaving its domestic private sector increasingly disheartened.

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