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China's 'Debt Bomb' Is Going off Under Xi Jinping : https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/china-s-debt-bomb-is-going-off-under-xi-jinping-opinion/ar-AATBBDY?ocid=msedgntp

Excerpts:
An "economic crisis," as Soros suggests, is coming.

Chinese officials have continually defied dire predictions, so many analysts think they will be able to muddle through this time. The problem, however, is that by muddling through in the past, officials postponed crises by taking on additional debt and thereby making the problem even more difficult to resolve. "They may have postponed dealing with it for too long, because people's confidence has now been shaken," Soros said.

Xi's tools to deal with out-of-control property prices are limited, in large part because of something else Soros mentioned at Hoover: out-of-control disease. COVID-19 is ripping through the country and, with ineffective Chinese-produced vaccines, the country's only defense against the coronavirus is isolation.

Isolation is the enemy of economic growth. Xi's "zero-COVID" policy of draconian lockdowns has made maintaining the internal Chinese economy exceedingly difficult.

The highly respected Diana Choyleva, the chief economist at London-based Enodo Economics, argues China's economy is headed for "stagnation," not "collapse." Her reasoning is highly persuasive; nonetheless, the issue for Beijing today is whether, in the middle of a debt crisis, stagnation must inevitably lead to outright collapse.