【英语财经】中国经济雄风不再？ China: weakended foundations

In the thick of the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, as one desperate country after another slashed the value of their currencies, China was credited with halting the malaise by keeping its exchange rate pegged firmly to the dollar.

In 2008, as the global financial system stood on the edge of a precipice, China once again fixed the renminbi to the dollar and launched a huge domestic stimulus package that boosted demand for everything from Australian iron ore to American cars.

So why did China decide last week to break the great taboo and devalue its currency when there was no apparent crisis?

The answer is that China is already in the midst of its own creeping economic crisis and does not have enough tools to deal with it, according to analysts and even some Communist party officials speaking on condition of anonymity.

“Last week’s decision to move to a more flexible currency reflects the fact the underlying economy is much weaker than the official figures show,” says Rodney Jones, founder of Wigram Capital and one of the people credited with first predicting the 1990s Asian crisis. “After 30 years, China’s old economic model has broken down and actual growth is much weaker than anything we’ve seen before. The problem for China’s leaders is that their menu of possible policy options is more limited than in the past.”

Filling villas and hotels

On a remote patch of swampy farmland about halfway between Beijing and the port city of Tianjin, which was hit by deadly explosions last week, the enormous “Jingjin New City” villa development provides a visual aid for anyone trying to understand the challenges facing China.

A little beyond the Kai Xuan Men — literally “Arc de Triomphe” — entrance gate and adjacent golden statue sits an astonishing 800-room Hyatt Regency built to resemble a European palace.

Fewer than 10 per cent of the rooms are occupied on any given night, according to staff. The indoor tennis arena and other facilities were locked up and rusting this week. Just seven years after the hotel opened, the building is falling apart and the balconies of many rooms have tall weeds growing on them.

From those balconies guests can look out over what property agents boast is “Asia’s biggest villa complex”, spread over 15 square kilometres. More than 2,000 villas have already been built, hundreds are still under construction and there are plans for another 4,000. The vast majority of the existing villas, built with generous loans from state-owned banks, are empty and some appear abandoned.

The Jingjin development is just part of a much larger 105 sq km planned residential zone — nearly twice the size of Manhattan — and around its edges smaller villa complexes, with names like “Dream Life in Europe”, are frozen in various stages of construction.

“We’ve stopped building and selling villas because nobody is buying,” says the caretaker at the “Dreamland of Town” development on the edge of Jing-jin New City. “I’m not sure if these will ever be finished and put on the market.”

The nearest hospital is more than 20km away and even the most basic amenities are missing from the “new city”. Row after row of storefronts in

Jingjin’s main shopping complex are boarded up, with only a couple of dingy convenience stores showing signs of life.

“Some people from Beijing and Tianjin have bought places here as investments and they sometimes come on the weekends, but most of my customers are workers at the hotel, security guards or people working at the showroom trying to sell villas,” says the owner of one of the convenience stores.

There are scores, if not hundreds, of “ghost cities” across the country. It seems perverse that developments such as these should exist in the world’s most populous nation, where land is scarce and many people are still too poor to afford decent housing. The Jingjin New City project and many others like it exemplify the government’s dilemma as it tries to keep growth from tumbling below its annual target of around 7 per cent, already the slowest pace for China in a quarter of a century.

For well over a decade, China’s economy has been powered by two main engines: its enormous export-oriented manufacturing sector and its scramble to build cities from scratch, even if no one actually wants to live in them.

In the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, as China’s exports collapsed, the government ordered its state-owned banks to unleash a wave of credit that has been described by economists as the greatest loosening of monetary policy in history.

Total debt in the Chinese economy quadrupled from $7tn in 2007 to $28tn by the middle of last year, according to the McKinsey Global Institute. At 282 per cent of gross domestic product and climbing, China’s debt load was already bigger last year in relative terms than those of Germany and the US.

Heavy lifting

The majority of new credit has gone into property and associated industries such as steel, cement, glass and factories to produce fridges, televisions, light bulbs and the other products people need to put in their new homes.

Much of the debt and construction was taken on by local governments, which were expected to do most of the heavy lifting in boosting GDP and maintaining employment at any cost. The investment and construction boom continued even after Beijing began tightening restrictions on lending and housing purchases as it tried to rein in the resulting credit and property bubbles.

When investment in real estate finally began to decline this year it prompted the government to reverse its restrictions on credit and property purchases, and significantly loosen monetary policy through interest rate cuts and state-directed bank lending.

In recent months, China’s leaders have been in continuous crisis mode, rolling out one stimulus measure after another in their efforts to prop up sagging growth.

The most obvious examples have been Beijing’s extraordinary efforts to reverse a stock market collapse last month, which included everything from government stock purchases to criminalising share sales by large investors.

But attempts to support the real economy have been almost as significant.

Last month, the People’s Bank of China pumped nearly $100bn into two state-owned “policy banks” that will fund local government infrastructure projects. The central bank has also allowed these banks to issue trillions of renminbi in bonds to support lending.

Beijing has launched a huge programme that some describe as “quantitative easing with Chinese characteristics”, to swap short-term local government debt for longer-term, lower-cost bonds. But even after this debt swap, local governments will have to make Rmb1tn ($156bn) in interest payments on their existing debt this year alone, according to estimates from JPMorgan.

Yet income from land sales, which had accounted for an average of 40 per cent of local government revenues, has plummeted in the past year. This means local governments are struggling just to service their growing debts and pay for basic public services, and are in no position to contribute to another stimulus programme such as the one in 2008.

“Local governments’ fiscal constraints were a key cause of the slowdown at the start of the year and have limited the effectiveness of growth stabilisation measures,” says Zhu Haibin, chief China economist at JPMorgan.

The central government has tried to encourage private investment in public infrastructure projects and has poured trillions of renminbi into huge national projects this year, such as rail and road networks, sewage treatment facilities and shantytown redevelopments.

But this has not been enough to offset falling investment in factories and apartment blocks. Last month, fixed asset investment across the country rose by its slowest pace in 15 years.

Property woes

Despite a rebound of housing transactions and prices in recent months in larger cities, the downturn is expected to continue because 70 per cent of

property investment happens in smaller cities and places with chronic oversupply such as Jingjin New City.

Even with a recovery in major cities, the property sector will probably subtract 1.5 per cent from GDP growth this year, according to estimates from Wang Tao, chief China economist at UBS.

The construction slowdown has hammered global commodity prices, with Chinese production of steel, cement, glass and other materials falling by record levels in recent months. As a result of massive overcapacity in these and other industries, average producer prices have been falling for more than three years.

“In the near term, [government] infrastructure investment can directly contribute to GDP growth but may not have much of a multiplier effect in the immediate following years,” says Ms Wang. “In other words, the government will need to more than double the level of new infrastructure investment just to keep overall investment growth steady.”

That seems impossible, especially in the context of existing overinvestment embodied by places such as Jingjin. And thanks to the country’s existing debt load, rampant overcapacity and the bursting of property and equity bubbles, China’s available options for stimulating growth are far fewer than they were during past crises.

It is in that context that Beijing reached last week for a weapon it has refrained from deploying for more than two decades. As China’s leaders have long known, devaluing the currency is a risky move because it can trigger currency wars — ultimately leaving the country no better off. In the wake of China’s move last week, Malaysia’s ringgit and Indonesia’s rupiah both fell to their lowest levels against the dollar since the depths of the 1998 Asian crisis.

But China’s crucial export sector has performed worse this year than at any point since 2008. Last week’s devaluation came just days after the government said exports in July fell 8.3 per cent from the same month a year earlier.

“We believe that the renminbi [foreign exchange] devaluations are aimed at stimulating the export sector after the authorities recently realised that domestic demand alone is unable to stabilise the economy,” says Li Junheng at JL Warren Capital.

China’s central bank has publicly ridiculed the idea that it wants to devalue the renminbi by at least 10 per cent against the dollar. But with growth rates still falling and few other options left, that is exactly what some mid-ranking and retired officials in Beijing think the country’s leaders would like to see in the coming months.

Facing a sharp slowdown at home and few tools to deal with it, China does not seem to be in a position to show the resolve it displayed in the late 1990s and 2008. Instead, its leaders appear to have concluded that they must risk a currency war abroad.

Two days after it announced a historic devaluation and shift to a more market-based currency, China’s central bank held a rare press conference in a basement room under its imposing headquarters in Beijing.

The message was simple if logically inconsistent — China’s exchange rate would now be decided by the market but the People’s Bank of China had the power and the resources to make sure the currency trades at whatever level China’s leaders feel is appropriate, without any messy volatility. “We need to believe in the market, respect the market, fear the market and adapt to the market,” said PBoC deputy governor Yi Gang. “But we also can’t forget that the government must play a more important role.”

In the week since it has become clear that the central bank will intervene whenever it wants to make sure the currency continues to trade in a tight band around the US dollar.

But many global investors are asking why Beijing decided to move now and what it hoped to achieve. People familiar with Chinese bureaucracy say the devaluation was a classic reformist move by the PBoC, which has been trying for years to move to a more freely tradable currency. That would remove some of the distortions in the economy and allow Beijing to run a more independent monetary policy. But this is opposed by several agencies, such as the commerce ministry, which represents the interests of exporters.

In selling this move to Beijing’s leaders, the PBoC dressed it up as a devaluation that would help exporters and sold it as being in the national interest. But to the outside world, it has tried to portray the move as a market-based reform on the road to a more freely traded exchange rate.

“The [central bank] has orchestrated a clever combination of a move to weaken the renminbi with a shift to a more market-determined exchange rate, blunting foreign criticism of the renminbi devaluation,” says Eswar Prasad, former head of the IMF’s China unit. The coming months will reveal whether devaluation or market forces were the more powerful motivation for the move.

在上世纪90年代末亚洲金融危机最严重时，绝望的国家一个接一个地大幅贬值本国货币，中国却让人民币牢牢盯住美元，从而止住了危机的传染，获得了赞誉。

2008年，在全球金融体系处于崩溃边缘之际，中国再次让人民币汇率盯住美元，并出台了大规模的国内刺激举措，这些举措提升了从澳大利亚铁矿石到美国汽车等所有物品的需求。

那么，在没有任何明显危机之际，中国为何决定打破巨大禁忌、让人民币贬值呢？

分析师乃至一些要求匿名的中共官员表示，答案在于，中国自己已经处于静悄悄的经济危机当中，而且没有足够的工具来应对这场危机。

Wigram Capital创始人、因率先预测到上世纪90年代亚洲危机而获得赞誉的人士之一罗德尼?琼斯(Rodney Jones)表示：“中国政府让人民币成为更灵活货币的决定反映出，经济基本面要比官方数据显示的弱得多。30年过去了，中国旧日的经济模式已经崩溃，实际增长比我们之前看到的任何水平都要弱得多。中国领导人面临的问题是，他们的可选政策选项菜单比过去更短。”

空置的别墅和酒店

在北京和天津之间、距离两个城市都比较远的一块湿润的农地上，巨大的“京津新城”别墅开发项目有助于让人直观地理解中国面临的挑战。今年8月12日晚11时30分，天津滨海新区一个仓库发生爆炸，导致多人死亡。

“京津新城”入口处的“凯旋门”

在名为“凯旋门”的大门和旁边的金色雕像后面不远处，坐落着一座令人吃惊的凯悦酒店(Hyatt Regency)，模仿欧洲宫殿式样建造，有800间客房。

酒店员工称，这些房间任何一晚的入住率都不足10%。室内网球场和其他设施大门紧锁，锈迹斑斑。这家开业仅7年的酒店已开始破败，许多房间的阳台长着高高的野草。

客人们可以从那些阳台上俯瞰这个房地产经纪人口中的“亚洲最大别墅区”，总占地15平方公里。逾2000幢别墅已经建好，还有数百幢在建，此外还有4000幢正在规划当中。已经建好的这些别墅利用国有银行的慷慨贷款建成，其中绝大多数都在闲置，一些似乎已废弃。

京津新城只是规划规模大得多的105平方公里住宅区——几乎是曼哈顿的两倍——的一部分，在它的边缘处是一些较小型的别墅区，比如“原乡小镇”，完工程度各异，都处于停工状态。

位于京津新城边缘“鸿坤提香墅”的看管人表示：“我们已经停工了，销售也停了，因为没有人买。我不确定这些别墅会不会有完工和推向市场的那一天。”

位于“京津新城”的凯悦酒店

最近的医院距离这个“新城”也有200多公里，这里就连最基本的生活设施都没有。京津新城主要的购物中心里，一排排商铺全都用木板封住，只有两个昏暗的便利店还算有点生气。

其中一家便利店的店主说：“北京和天津的一些人在这里买房作为投资，他们有时会在周末过来，但我的主顾大多是酒店员工、保安，或者那些在样板间工作的售楼人员。”

中国各地有数十座、甚至数百座“鬼城”。中国是全世界人口最多的国家，在这个土地匮乏、许多人仍穷得住不起体面住房的国家里，诸如此类住宅项目的存在看上去是荒谬的。在中国政府努力保持增长率不跌至7%的年度目标之下之际——这种增速已经是中国25年来最慢的——京津新城项目以及其他许多类似项目证明了中国政府面临的困境。

在过去远远超过十年的时间里，中国经济一直由两个主要引擎提供动力：庞大的出口导向型制造业以及新城建设热（即便没有人真的想住进去）。

2008年危机之后，随着中国出口骤降，中国政府要求国有银行大举放贷，这被经济学家描述为历史上最大规模的货币政策放宽。

麦肯锡全球研究所(McKinsey Global Institute)的数据显示，到去年年中，中国经济债务总额从2007年的7万亿美元增长3倍至28万亿美元。去年中国债务总额与GDP的比例高达282%（而且这一比例还在不断上升），已超过德国和美国。

频频推出刺激措施

绝大多数新增信贷流向了房地产和钢铁、水泥、玻璃等相关行业，以及生产冰箱、电视、灯泡和其他新家中需要的产品的工厂。

许多债务和建设工作由地方政府承担，人们期望它们挑起不惜任何代价提升国内生产总值(GDP)和保就业的大部分重担。即便在中国政府为了遏制由此导致的信贷和房地产泡沫而开始收紧信贷和限制买房之后，这股投资和建设热潮仍在持续。



当今年房地产投资终于开始下降时，这促使中国政府取消对信贷和购房的限制，通过降息和国家指令性银行放贷来大幅放松货币政策。

中国领导人最近几个月一直处于持续的危机模式，接二连三地推出刺激措施以提振疲弱的增长。

最明显的例子是中国政府上月扭转股市暴跌趋势的非凡努力，包括从政府购股到宣布大投资者卖股非法等所有举措。

但支持实体经济的努力几乎同样令人瞩目。

上月，中国央行(PBoC)向两家国有“政策银行”注资近1000亿美元——这些政策银行将为地方政府基础建设项目提供融资。中国央行还允许这些银行发行数万亿元人民币的债券来支持放贷。

中国政府推出了一个将地方政府短期债券置换为较长期且较低成本债券的庞大项目——有些人称之为“具有中国特色的量化宽松”。但根据摩根大通(JPMorgan)的估计，即便在这种债务置换之后，地方政府仅今年就仍不得不为现有债务支付1万亿元人民币（合1560亿美元）的利息。



然而，原本平均占到地方政府收入40%的土地销售收入在过去一年里大幅下降。这意味着地方政府偿付日益增长的债务和为基本公共服务买单都很困难，无法为又一个像2008年那样的刺激项目出力。

摩根大通首席经济学家朱海滨表示：“地方政府财政吃紧是今年年初经济放缓的关键原因，也限制了稳增长举措的效果。”

中央政府试图鼓励公共基础设施项目方面的私人投资，今年中央政府还向大型国家项目投入数万亿元人民币，比如铁路和公路网、污水处理设施和棚户区改造项目。

但这不足以抵消对工厂和楼盘的投资的不断下滑。上个月全国固定资产投资增速为15年来最慢。

楼市困境

尽管大城市房地产交易量和价格在近几个月出现反弹，预计房地产的下行趋势还将持续，因为70%的房地产投资都投向了出现长期供应过剩的较小城市和地方，比如京津新城。

瑞银(UBS)首席中国经济学家汪涛表示，即使主要城市的房地产行业复苏，今年该行业也会拉低GDP增速1.5个百分点。

近几个月中国的钢、水泥、玻璃及其他原材料生产都出现创纪录下滑，中国建筑业放缓已冲击到全球大宗商品价格。由于这些和其他一些行业的大规模产能过剩，工业生产者出厂价格指数(PPI)已经连续3年多下滑。

“近期而言，（政府）基础设施投资可以直接拉动GDP增长，但在接下来的几年或许不会产生明显乘数效应。”汪涛表示，“换句话说，仅仅要保持整体投资增长稳定，政府就需要使新基础设施投资水平增长一倍多。”



这似乎是不可能的，尤其是在已然存在过度投资（京津新城这样的地方就是明证）的情况下。由于中国现有的债务负担、严重的产能过剩，以及房地产和股市泡沫的破裂，当前中国可用于刺激增长的选项比以往历次危机的时候少得多。

正是在这样的背景下，不久前北京方面拿出了一件它20多年来一直克制自己、没有使用的武器。中国领导人长期以来一直知道，货币贬值这步棋有风险，因为它可能引发汇率战争——最终这个国家的境况并不会变得更好。不久前中国走出这一步后，马来西亚林吉特和印尼卢比兑美元汇率都跌至自1998年亚洲危机最严重时期以来的最低水平。

但今年中国关键的出口业的表现比2008年以来的任何时候都糟糕。不久前的人民币贬值，就出现在政府表示7月份出口同比下降8.3%几天后。



“我们相信，人民币（汇率）贬值的目的是刺激出口业，不久前当局意识到仅靠国内需求无法稳定经济。”沃伦资本(JL Warren Capital)的李君蘅表示。

中国央行曾公开嘲笑有关其希望人民币对美元至少贬值10%的想法。但增长率仍在下滑，中国也没有多少其他选项，北京一些中层退休官员认为，中国的领导层希望在未来数月中看到的正是这样的贬值。

国内经济大幅放缓且没有多少工具可以应对，现在中国似乎并不能像在上世纪90年代末和2008年时那样，展现自己的魄力。相反，中国的领导人似乎已得出结论，他们必须冒在国外掀起一场汇率战争的风险。

延伸阅读：人民币贬值传达的讯息

宣布实施具有历史意义的贬值、让人民币汇率更为市场化后两天，中国央行少见地举行了一场新闻发布会，地点设在雄伟的北京总部的地下室房间里。

尽管逻辑上前后矛盾，传达的讯息是简单的——中国的汇率现在将由市场决定，但中国央行拥有权力和资源，能够确保人民币以中国领导人认为合适的任何汇率水平进行交易，不会出现任何难以应对的波动。“我们要相信市场、尊重市场、敬畏市场、顺应市场，”中国央行副行长易纲表示，“但同时我们也不要忘了，要更好地发挥政府的作用。”

在那周以后，很明显央行可以随时出手干预，确保人民币继续围绕美元，在一个狭窄的区间内交易。

但很多国际投资者在问，为何北京方面决定现在行动，他们又希望达成什么目标。熟悉中国官僚体系的人士表示，贬值是央行典型的改革派举措，他们数年来一直尝试让人民币更自由地交易。这将消除经济中的一些扭曲，让北京方面能够实施更独立的货币政策。但这遭到了几个部门的反对，比如代表出口商利益的商务部。

在说服中央领导人走出这一步时，央行将它包装成能够帮助出口商的贬值，以符合国家利益为理由说服了他们。但在面向外部世界时，央行则试图将这一举动描述为朝着汇率自由化方向前进的一场市场化改革。

“（央行）精心策划了这一招，把人民币贬值与转向在更大程度上由市场决定汇率巧妙结合起来，化解外国对人民币贬值的批评，”国际货币基金组织(IMF)原中国部主任埃斯瓦?普拉萨德(Eswar Prasad)表示。接下来几个月将向世人展现，该举措背后更有力的动机到底是贬值还是市场力量。

译者/何黎