Another way to put it is China investing in their own production at China size and scale destroys profit opportunity for western businesses. They want China to switch to a consumer economy because then it’s the govt financing buyers rather than financing upstart competition.
https://twitter.com/gonglei89/status/1765199789506113930
This isn’t as much about what’s good for China’s own growth and welfare as fear of what a China that can produce at scale sufficient for itself does to western global profits. If everything was made in China but owned by America they wouldn’t complain about investment glut.
Which is also why tenor and content of these criticisms sound exactly like what they said about Japan in the 1970s and 80s. Debt shaming meanwhile is mostly opportunistic. If this were credit card or mortgage or sovereign welfare debt, especially if controlled by western banks,
And especially for purchase of western controlled goods, they wouldn’t be beating drums so loudly, like they don’t for poorer developing countries. It’s the sort of argument built on impressionistic associations made to exert persuasive pressure on an unrelated matter that’s…
Actually serving interests of someone else. Ultimately this discourse is less motivated by what’s good for China’s own economic development than it is by what’s good for Western interests in relation to China. The rest is a pseudo-intellectual wrapper for rhetorical persuasion.
And if you think about it this characterization is entirely consistent with how Western countries talk and think about “free trade”. It’s always framed in terms of opening markets for Western sellers to the benefit of poor country buyers who can’t make their own good products.
If poor countries can’t afford it they’ll even be able to take out loans from Western banks. Free trade is presented as a generosity and kindness to poor countries graced with benefits of superior western products. Meanwhile poor countries get to export commodities, but…
If rich western countries have money to buy up ownership to poor country commodities production that’s only fair, part of the free trade deal! Of course result also happens to be that western countries control their own exports out of poor countries, especially the trade profits.
The mood quickly turns if any part of this equation is disrupted, like if the poor country tries to attain ownership of profits for their own exports, or erecting they’re own high value goods producers without opportunity for western finance to attain controlling stakes, etc.
The playbook is remarkably consistent once you peel back the artifice. Countries that don’t allow one of three levers of Western control (control over production, control over profits, control over ownership) are all accused of cheating, wasteful investing, or unwise debts.
It’s supremely ironic that China gets accused of mercantilism when the global “free trade” system, once you really observe how western countries like to referee it, looks so much like the colonial mercantilist system, only with financial rather than colonial ownership mechanisms.
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