自新冠疫情以来的过去一年里，中国的大部分地区笼罩着经济复苏缓慢所带来的阴霾。大学生们在寻找工作的道路上举步维艰，白领阶层面临薪酬削减与裁员的压力，企业家们的资金链和债务支付问题日益严峻，中产阶级的财富被岌岌可危的房价蚕食，而富人们则在疯狂地将资产转移至海外。
临近中华人民共和国成立75周年的纪念日，这样的气氛仿佛是一场篮球比赛的终局阶段：当某一方远远落后、胜利似乎无望时，这种悲观氛围在中国弥漫。这种情绪远不如五年前2019年国庆节前夕那样乐观。那时，经济学家们忙于预测中国何时能超越美国成为全球最大经济体。如今，这类对话已鲜少发生。
讨论的焦点转而变成了如何避免重蹈日本上世纪九十年代楼市泡沫破裂后经济陷入长达十年停滞不前的局面。在经历了数月日益严峻的经济数据之后，中国政府终于决定采取迫切需要的刺激措施，旨在稳定全球第二大经济体的信心。上周，中国央行推出了多项举措以对抗不断下跌的价格，包括允许商业银行增加放贷和降低个人与企业借贷成本。
次日，官员们继续传递出积极信息：对弱势公民提供现金补贴，并承诺为面临就业难题的应届毕业生提供更多援助。周三，执政的共产党中央政治局宣布了更为坚定的信息。这是一年一度的传统会议，但此次被用于经济事务，这在传统上是很少见的情况。高级官员认识到经济中出现了“新的情况和问题”，并呼吁采取紧急行动，以增加财政支出、遏制房地产业下滑趋势，并改善毕业生与农民工的就业。
据经济分析师徐天辰（Economist Intelligence Unit的资深经济学家）所说，“这么多措施同时推出表明了决策者急切需要提振经济”。这股政策快打为萎靡不振的股市带来了一针强心剂，使其在国家长假前一周实现了近16年来最大单周涨幅超过15%。香港恒生指数上周大涨13%，创下自1998年以来的最佳表现（根据路透社）。周一延续了这种狂热，上海和深圳两个证券交易所的总成交额达到1.8万亿元人民币（约2280亿美元），创下历史新高记录。
尽管官方制造业活动指数连续第四个月萎缩，但股市可能出现了一次极为引人瞩目的反弹。一些著名投资者对此表示兴奋，如美国对冲基金阿帕卢萨管理公司创始人达维德·特珀（David Tepper）在接受CNBC采访时表示正买入更多与中国经济相关的资产。
虽然股市的高涨可能标志着中国经济的一次奇迹般的转折，但经济学家认为扭转经济下滑仍需更多努力。“刺激股市并不能真正为中国的实体经济带来多大帮助。相比其他主要市场，参与股票市场的人员很少。”Rhodium Group的中国市场研究负责人洛根·怀特（Logan Wright）表示。
由于房地产业占中国GDP约四分之一和70%的家庭财富份额，在这场低迷中面临着严峻的前景。“北京能做的并不多。”怀特补充道，“房地产行业的调整几乎已经完成，而政策在稳定市场方面效果并不理想。”
过去几十年来，以投资为驱动力的增长模式正在进入死胡同。为了平衡经济并转向更可持续的消费驱动增长模式，中国需要进行财政制度的根本改革，包括收入再分配和对家庭更大的转移支付。
上周宣布的一系列措施未能解决支撑经济增长的结构性问题。中国的储蓄率历来排名全球之首。尽管一次性的现金补助与补贴短期内能提振消费，但要让民众在未来长期感到舒适地支出，强大的社会福利和医疗保健系统是必要的。
房地产困境
面对占经济近四分之一比重、以及家庭财富约七成份额的房地产业前景黯淡，中国的展望依然悲观。怀特表示，“在北京能做些什么方面并无太多办法。”“在许多方面，该行业的调整已接近尾声，但政策对稳定它并未产生明显效果。”
经历了数年的繁荣周期之后，中国的房地产市场自2020年陷入困境以来已进入第四年衰退阶段。这期间，政府对开发商的过度借贷进行打击以抑制高额债务问题。尽管北京努力提振市场、努力复苏需求，新房价格依然不断下滑。
在共同推动岌岌可危的房地产业市场之际，广州成为了中国首个取消购房限制的一线城市；上海和深圳也放宽了购房规则。中国如今面临着的问题是：即使其14亿人口也无法填补如此庞大的空置公寓数量。更糟糕的是，过去两年中，人口已经开始减少，这一人口变化可能对未来增长造成进一步的打击。
中国政府鼓励生育的努力未能取得成功。越来越多的年轻人推迟结婚或生子，甚至完全放弃这些传统选择。许多人对“内卷”——形容他们生活中的激烈竞争感到厌倦：从追求学术卓越到建立成功的事业，种种压力令他们不胜其烦。一些人采取了“躺平”或“自我消磨”的形式：通过仅做足够维持生计的最少努力来被动抵抗社会压力。
这些流行语反映了中国一代年轻人心中的挫败与绝望感。有些人感到自己的生活轨迹与习近平主席所描绘的“中国梦”——国家不可阻挡复兴蓝图越来越不符。随着经济增速放缓，中国青年目睹了个人自由权在威权统治下收缩、就业前景在疲软经济中黯淡的事实。对私营部门的打压，包括针对大型科技公司和私人教育等领域的限制，已消灭了许多应届毕业生可能获取的工作机会。8月失业率达到18.8%，为去年改变统计方法以排除学生人数后的最高水平。
这对中国共产党构成了潜在问题——该党长期以来在前所未有的增长中建立其合法性。随着经济放缓，习近平加强了另一个巩固政权合法性的支柱：民族主义，预计将在9月3日中华人民共和国成立75周年纪念日上予以强调。然而，新加坡国立大学李光耀公共政策学院的助理教授阿尔弗雷德·吴（Alfred Wu）表示，“中共高层并未放弃经济增长表现这一论点。”
“他们希望恢复公众对经济的信心，但共产党的最大难题是缺乏解决经济放缓的有效方案。”
新闻来源：www.cnn.com
原文地址：Communist China is celebrating its 75th birthday and its stock market is soaring. But not everyone is in the party spirit
新闻日期：2024-09-30
原文摘要：
For much of the past year since China reopened to the world following the Covid-19 pandemic, a pall has hung over large swathes of the country as its economy struggles to regain momentum. The country’s bright young minds are having a hard time landing a job; its white-collar professionals are hit by pay cuts and layoffs; its entrepreneurs struggle to finance their businesses and pay off debts; its middle-class families are seeing their wealth slashed by crumbling housing prices; and its rich race to move money out of the country. In the months leading up to the 75th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic on Tuesday, the mood was encapsulated by a new buzz phrase: “the garbage time of history.” Like the final minutes of a basketball game with one team trailing so far behind that all efforts to win seem futile, some Chinese believe their country is trapped in a similarly bleak period with little hope for a turnaround. The pessimism was a far cry from the buoyant outlook just five years ago, during the last major National Day celebrations in 2019. Back then, economists were rushing to predict when China might overtake the United States to become the world’s largest economy. Those conversations aren’t happening much anymore. These days, the talk centers on how Beijing can avoid a repeat of Japan’s “lost decade” of economic stagnation following bursting of its housing bubble in the 1990s. Last week, after months of increasingly grim economic data, Chinese leader Xi Jinping finally gave the nod to a much-needed stimulus package in a bid to shore up faith in the world’s second largest economy. On Tuesday, the country’s central bank unveiled a raft of measures to counter falling prices, including freeing commercial banks to lend more money and making it cheaper for households and companies to borrow. Officials kept up the positive drumbeat the next day by announcing rare cash handouts to disadvantaged citizens and pledging subsidies for recent graduates struggling to find a job. And on Thursday, the ruling Communist Party’s 24-member Politburo continued the bullish messaging. In a break with tradition, Xi dedicated the group’s September meeting to economic affairs. The top officials acknowledged that “new situations and problems” have arisen in the economy and demanded urgent action, vowing to boost fiscal spending, arrest the decline of the property market and improve employment for fresh graduates and migrant workers. According to Xu Tianchen, senior economist at the Economist Intelligence Unit, the “rare, simultaneous rollout of so many measures underscored the urgency for policymakers to prop up the economy.” The policy blitz gave an adrenaline shot to the country’s dismal stock market days before the week-long national holiday, which starts on Tuesday. China’s blue-chips stocks soared more than 15% last week in its biggest single-week gain in nearly 16 years. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index surged 13%, notching its best week since 1998, according to Reuters. The frenzy continued on Monday, when the combined turnover on the Shanghai and Shenzhen bourses exceeded 1.8 trillion yuan ($228 billion), logging a record high, according to the Securities Times, a state-run financial newspaper. That’s despite a key measure of factory activity, the official purchasing managers’ index (PMI), shrinking for another month in September. Remarkable turnaround Even some big-name investors are excited by the rally. David Tepper, the billionaire founder of American hedge fund Appaloosa Management, told CNBC in an interview Thursday that he was buying more of “everything” related to China. The stock market may be in the midst of one of its most remarkable turnarounds, but economists say reversing China’s economic downturn will require much more work. “Stimulating the stock market doesn’t really do much for the real economy in China. Very few people invest in the stock market compared to other major markets,” said Logan Wright, director of China markets research at Rhodium Group. Chinese households have suffered a massive loss of wealth from a slump in the housing market, amounting to an estimated $18 trillion, Barclays economists said in a research note earlier this month. It’s as if each three-person household in China has lost around $60,000, an amount that is almost five times China’s per capita gross domestic product. Wright said the stimulus package “makes the leadership look more reactive, more responsive to the downturn in the economy. And that is what’s generated some of the more positive sentiment (last) week. But nothing really changes in terms of the structural outlook.” China’s decades-long investment-led growth has reached “a dead end,” and fundamental overhauls of its fiscal system — including a redistribution of income and greater transfers to households — are needed to rebalance the economy toward a more sustainable consumption-led growth model, Wright said. There has been little in the barrage of measures announced last week to address the underlying structural problems weighing down economic growth. China has long had one of the highest saving rates in the world. While one-off cash handouts and subsidies may boost short-term consumption, robust social welfare and healthcare are needed to make Chinese households feel comfortable to spend more in the long run, especially following the collapse of the property sector, where most Chinese invest their savings. Property woes The outlook for the real estate industry, which makes up about a quarter of the Chinese economy and 70% of household wealth, remains dim. “There’s not much Beijing can do,” Wright said. “In many ways, the adjustment in the property sector is almost complete, and policy hasn’t been very effective in stabilizing it.” After decades of boom, China’s real estate sector is now in its fourth year of contraction since falling into a deep crisis in 2020, when the government cracked down on excessive borrowing by developers to rein in their high debt. Beijing’s efforts to rescue the market have struggled to revive demand, with prices of new homes continuing their freefall. In a concerted push to prop up the embattled property market, the southern metropolis of Guangzhou became China’s first tier-one city to lift all restrictions on home purchases on Sunday, while Shanghai and Shenzhen also eased rules for home buyers. The country now has so many empty apartments that not even all of its 1.4 billion people are enough to fill them. To make matters worse, the population has been shrinking for two years, a demographic shift that could further hobble future growth. The Chinese government’s efforts to encourage births has also failed. More and more young people are delaying marriage and childbirth, if not foregoing them all together. Many feel jaded or burnt out from “involution” – a catchphrase describing the intense competition that has dominated their lives, from striving for academic excellence to building a successful career. Some are resorting to “lying flat” or “letting it rot,” a form of passive resistance against society’s pressure by doing just enough to get by. These buzzwords sum up a growing sense of despair among China’s disenchanted youth. Some are finding the arc of their lives increasingly out of sync with the expected upward trajectory described in Xi’s “China dream,” a grand vision of “unstoppable” national rejuvenation. Having grown up in an era of breakneck economic growth and ever-improving living standards, China’s Gen-Zs are now reckoning with the possibility that they might not do better than their parents, whose generation accepted limited freedoms in exchange for promised prosperity. Over the past years, China’s youth have watched their personal freedoms shrink under Xi’s authoritarian rule and their job prospects dim in a flagging economy. Xi’s crackdown on the private sector, from big tech to private tutoring, has eliminated many jobs once available to China’s fresh graduates. The youth unemployment rate soared to 18.8% in August, the highest since authorities changed the methodology last year to exclude students. That poses a potential problem for the Communist Party, which has for decades staked its legitimacy on the country’s unprecedented growth. As the economy slows, Xi has bolstered another pillar of the regime’s legitimacy: nationalism, which he is expected to invoke to mark the country’s 75th anniversary on Tuesday. But Alfred Wu, an associate professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, said Chinese leaders are not “planning on giving up the economic performance argument yet.” “They want to restore confidence in the economy, but the most troublesome headache for the Communist Party is they don’t have effective solutions to the economic slowdown.”
