Feeds still insist China is sliding into crisis: developers default, bond yields sink below 2 percent, foreign cash flees. Yet out of sight a different engine hums at 400 km/h—the new CR450 bullet train built by factories now receiving the credit once lavished on condos. After Washington’s 2018 chip ban, Beijing funnelled loans into batteries, robots and five-nanometre fabs. BYD’s Qin L hybrid drives 2 300 km on one tank and costs less than a used Corolla; China installs more industrial robots each year than the rest of the world combined. Growth has migrated from malls to machines.
Excess savings—nearly a trillion dollars annually—pile into gold, ultra-cheap government bonds and Hong Kong dollar accounts, forming an offshore “Asia-dollar” pool reminiscent of 1960s Eurodollars. Layer that liquidity onto WeChat wallets and a pilot digital yuan and you get a new payment highway poised to sidestep SWIFT’s tollbooths and the sanctions they enable.
Washington answers with tariffs and chip rules, but embargoes often fertilise the self-reliance they aim to stunt. When confidence returns and that sidelined cash finally rolls home, it will either light the fuse of a fresh industrial surge—or of the next collision between financial empires.
