Stock market volatility and a small currency devaluation have in the past few months caused the financial community to take note of Chinese economic weakness. A natural question is what effect this weakness will have on the rest of the world. The answer is very little, with most important reason being that China has not truly contributed to the global economy for at least four years.
The idea that Chinese weakness threatens the world economy melds a number of misconceptions. The first is that the weakness is a new phenomenon. It was actually the initial stock market climb and a rising renminbi that were somewhat surprising; the ensuring partial corrections were late in coming, if anything.
China’s economy began weakening no later than 2008, and probably before. A temporary upswing starting in late 2009 and continuing into 2010 was due to an unsustainable, unwise, and unprecedented explosion in debt. From 2011 on, ups and downs in the global economy have not been due to ups and downs in China – the trend in Chinese performance has been invariably down.