The Miracle Is Over: Inside China's Slow-Motion Economic Decay
China's boom ran on the largest credit expansion ever recorded — roughly a third of global GDP in eight years. Rhodium Group's Logan Wright, who spent fourteen years tracking the financial plumbing from Beijing and Hong Kong, argues that engine has been shutting down since 2018 and the economy behind the headline numbers is growing at 1.5–2%, not 5%. China peaked at 18.5% of global GDP in 2021 and has been sliding ever since. The US has quietly outgrown it every year since. Wright and host Dmitri Alperovitch talk through why PPP flatters an economy suffering from deflation, why $52 trillion of RMB penned behind capital controls makes outflows inevitable, and why the widely-cited pivot from property to EVs, batteries and AI doesn't survive contact with the data. Rhodium tracks industrial land sales and local-government revenue bonds: strategic industries went from 2% to 6% of issuance whi
