The "Chinese government" is not a singular, monolithic entity in the same way the "US Government" is actually a bunch of departments, branches and jurisdiction levels each with competing and sometimes differing interests and goals. (but yes, it is more unified in China in the sticking to party line).
The Chinese federal government has been wanting to make this re-balancing for a long time (a shift away from exports towards domestic consumption, and shifts from inefficient state owned enterprises to companies that can operate more efficiently and are "market oriented").
Where you are also correct is that many of the inflated GDP numbers and "inefficient" investments / capital towards things like ghost cities are mostly driven by state governments, in their attempt to meet the "goals" as stated by the federal government.
Do you have evidence of this? Isn't one of the biggest US complaints that many Chinese businesses are indistinguishable from the government?
You are also right - yes one of the biggest complains IS that many Chinese businesses are "owned" by the government with lots of influence there. However, the big resistive force here preventing this further breakup is that they are such huge employers, and it is not politically easy to reduce and remove so many people from the payrolls. So it has been a slow process.
Here is an article roughly related: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2015/12/30/china-star...
Communist party leaders own huge portions of their state sponsored businesses and directly benefit from their success. Chinese leaders don't want fair competition, they want to be rich.
And that skill seems to help when trying to understand China itself!
If you are talking about "求同存异" that's for agreeing to have disagreement, which is a common cooperation culture around the globe.
If you are talking about "无为而治" from the Taoism philosophy of doing without actually forcing, that's not something relevant here though.
PS: I am often amused by people coming up with obviously-weird/nonsensical claims on Chinese, China or its culture, and the readers seemingly unable to apply common sense to disapprove them. This, to me, is an unconscious (or actually intentional) way of reinforce stereotype on China, which can be useful, for example, in mwny cases when someone in power wants to mobilize the common people, such stereotype really makes things easier to get approved.
The world is not black or white. Enlarging your perspectives always help.
Not quite.
It has side effects of course, but Chinese government have much better control of the macro-economy compared to free markets in most other countries, and that would help a lot in avoiding economical crisis. The debt issue is concerning, but I think Chinese government is much faster in acting on and fixing problems.
Some of the slow down mentioned in the article, such as the fall in housing market, seems to be exactly what the government want, as they've tighten the rules for real estate by a lot earlier this year. There're strict criteria people have to meet to be eligible for purchasing a house. This is a good thing because the current real estate market in China is almost insane.
Since every bank in China is under the direction of the central government it's up to a committee therein to decide which companies end up bankrupt. China might look like it has a modern capital market but it's still centrally controlled for key parts. National banks can and will infinitely extend credit lines to unprofitable companies if it's in the governments interest (for example to prevent public unrest).
China always had a requirement to grow 6% for every city. So I believe some numbers are inflated ( mostly about real estate eg. Ghost cities, ..). This doesn't give many issues, because there is actual growth.
The reasoning goes that when the growth slows, the entire pyramid goes crumbling down ( debts).
As weird as it is, I think it's an objective overview of everything China related. It's a personal hunch of all the FOMO I read about China and can't support it with links.
The reasoning I follow is: expansion internally (China), expansion externally ( requirement) with Africa / one road one belt, knocking down on bank fraud, no export of money internationally, ... In the process, trying to become too big too fail.
We'll see if I'm right about this.
Ps. I could be wrong, so comments are appreciated