Why The China Bubble Still Hasn’t Popped
Changes in the Chinese economy signal evolution, not collapse.
Illustration: Maria Fedoseeva for Bloomberg
When Bloomberg Economics Chief Economist Tom Orlik published China: The Bubble That Never Pops (Oxford University Press) in 2020, the Chinese economy was facing threats on multiple fronts. After the economic miracle of the previous decades, a downward spiral seemed to be in the cards. In this Next Chapter, Orlik revisits his thesis and explains why the Chinese bubble still hasn’t burst.
In 2001, Gordon Chang published a contender for the least prescient China book ever. In The Coming Collapse of China (Random House, 2001), Chang, an American lawyer, made the case that the combination of an authoritarian political system, creaking state-owned industrial firms, and intense global competition — a consequence of China’s entry to the World Trade Organization — would deal a death blow to the economy.