China's economy grew 3 times faster than the US
- By John Ross
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E-mail China.org.cn, February 2, 2015
· In 2014 the RMB's exchange rate fell against the dollar, thereby understating China's real output increase compared to the U.S. If measured at World Bank Parity Purchasing Powers (PPPs), China added approximately $1,300 billion to GDP compared to the $653 billion added by the U.S.
By whatever measure, therefore, China's economy considerably outgrew that of the U.S.
Such factual data is particularly illuminating in light of a consistent misrepresentation in certain parts of the financial media that China's economy is in a "crisis" or "severe slowdown," while the U.S. is undergoing "rapid growth." The data shows that, on the contrary, China not only continued to be the world's most rapidly growing major economy but continued to significantly outgrow the U.S.
A selection of headlines gives the flavor of what facts now show to have been unjustified "scare stories" about China. In January 2014, the Financial Times ran an article headlined "China's debt-fuelled boom is in danger of turning to bust." In April, another Financial Times headline declared "China's crisis is coming - the only question is how big it will be." In October, the American Enterprise Institute announced "An economic mess in China."
American academic Michael Pettis is a favorite source in such articles - the U.S. financial website Zero Hedge featured an article entitled "A Chinese Soft-Landing Will Inevitably Lead To A 'Very Brutal Hard Landing,' Pettis Warns." The Financial Times carried several articles by George Magnus, former Senior Economic Adviser to Swiss bank UBS, who predicts a coming slowdown of China's economic growth to 3.9 percent.
The contrast between such headlines and the actual economic results was therefore striking.
But such inaccurate material recycles a decades-old genre of what may be termed "fictional economics" predicting the coming "crisis" or "drastic slowdown" in China. This was not confined to fringe publications but involved persistently inaccurate projections by major Western media. For example, in 2002 Gordon Chang wrote a book entitled "The Coming Collapse of China," the thesis of which is self-explanatory. Chang argued, "A half-decade ago the leaders of the People's Republic had real choices. Today they do not. They have no exit. They have run out of time." Over a decade later, since time has not yet run out, one might expect that such an author's analysis would be disregarded. But instead, Chang was featured by Forbes and Bloomberg TV as a "China expert."
