【英语财经】中共管理复杂经济的能力出问题了吗？ Beijing’s economic competence questioned

For more than two decades the Chinese Communist party has offered the masses an unwritten social contract — we will manage the country and allow you to get rich, as long as you stay out of politics.

Rapidly rising living standards and a bureaucracy that was remarkably successful at achieving high rates of growth left most ordinary citizens convinced this was a pretty good deal.

Most foreign investors in the country have been similarly impressed by the competence of Chinese technocrats and their ability to manage an increasingly complex economy that is now the world’s largest, at least in purchasing power terms.

But a stock market crash and a series of policy mis-steps over the summer have left many investors questioning their faith in the infallibility of the mandarins in Beijing.

Meanwhile, the relentless slowdown in the broader Chinese economy that has been under way for the last few years appears to be worsening, and deep-seated problems in the real estate, manufacturing and financial sectors are becoming more acute.

As recently as two years ago, many Chinese officials were still confidently predicting that the economy would continue to expand at a steady rate of 8 per cent for at least two more decades.

But China will grow at its slowest annual pace in a quarter of a century this year as the Communist Party struggles to achieve its full-year target of “around 7 per cent” growth in GDP. According to official statistics, the economy expanded 6.9 per cent in the third quarter from a year earlier%2