http://www.economist.com/news/business/21696552-chinas-indus... http://www.economist.com/news/business/21693573-chinas-exces...
My first thought following reading that was "Yeah, and then the Farmer transfers that money into the stock market, and creates the bubble effect that is only corrected by direct intervention not allowing it to go down naturally."
> Horrific pollution
China's going to get their Clean Air Act. Just give it some time.
Improper irrigation can even lead to salts rising up to the soil surface and making it permanently infertile barring major earth works. Falling water tables can allow the ground to compress (now-empty pores deflate) and significantly lower the ground's ability to carry groundwater (as has happened in California).
Some damage is permanent, and we were not capable of the worst back then.
Further, repression also make the equivalent of a Clean Air Act hard. The pattern currently is the central authorities issue a call to protect the environment (usually kind of ad-hoc) but local authorities ignore it and no one can complain because all the authorities are beyond criticism.
Just like the way you have the President start an anti-corruption campaign but the President's cronies exempt.
China boosters for years said these problems didn't matter. Maybe they didn't matter for those years but now, they are here in spades.
China may (or may not, for all I know) have beaten the West in the game of getting the technology it wants but the country has enough structural problems that it's chances of getting ahead of the West broadly are looking very dim.
Problems: Horrific pollution, huge loans to inefficient state-run industries, massive real state and infrastructure mal-investment and bubbles, losing conventional factory jobs to even lower waged centered without gaining better jobs in compensation, having a first world demographic structure (lots of old people) without a first world standard of living, a government that's resorting to repression and ideology to solve problems and so-doubling down on all mistakes, the falsification of statistics can barely conceal an economy in stasis, etc.
So, there's little to fear from a Chinese economic "juggernaut" but the decline of China poses serious problems - especially, it seems to be what fueling the huffing and puffing over the South China sea.