The Miracle Is Over: Inside China's Slow-Motion Economic Decay

China's boom ran on the largest credit expansion ever recorded — roughly a third of global GDP in eight years. Rhodium Group's Logan Wright, who spent fourteen years tracking the financial plumbing from Beijing and Hong Kong, argues that engine has been shutting down since 2018 and the economy behind the headline numbers is growing at 1.5–2%, not 5%. China peaked at 18.5% of global GDP in 2021 and has been sliding ever since. The US has quietly outgrown it every year since.

Wright and host Dmitri Alperovitch talk through why PPP flatters an economy suffering from deflation, why $52 trillion of RMB penned behind capital controls makes outflows inevitable, and why the widely-cited pivot from property to EVs, batteries and AI doesn't survive contact with the data. Rhodium tracks industrial land sales and local-government revenue bonds: strategic industries went from 2% to 6% of issuance while the share of loans priced at or below the prime rate climbed to 59%. The story of China's credit of the last decade: not reallocation to productive industries but forbearance.

What emerges is a picture with no Lehman moment and no bank runs. Just deflation, a 9.5%-of-GDP deficit buying less each year, export competitiveness that comes from weak domestic demand rather than strength, and a decade that looks uncomfortably like Japan's.

00:00 Introduction

01:16 China's economic decline

03:25 How the US has outgrown China for five years

06:11 Why China's PPP lead doesn't matter

12:41 Beijing's fear of capital outflows

16:39 What could trigger a financial crisis

17:14 Credit is flowing to the least productive sectors

19:31 Throwing good money after bad

26:59 China's dependence on Europe

34:19 Can China boost domestic demand?

38:58 The Chinese economy in 2035