China

01Structure

China's economy has been organised for two decades around two engines: manufacturing for export, and property construction for domestic demand. The second has been contracting since 2021. Property accounts for something like a quarter of GDP once construction, materials, land sales and related services are counted,¹ and the main activity indicators — new starts, sales, developer investment — are down between fifty and eighty per cent from their 2020–21 peaks.²

That downturn subtracted roughly two percentage points a year from growth in 2024 and 2025, a drag expected to narrow as the adjustment matures.² Nothing of comparable size has replaced it domestically, which is why the export engine has had to carry more.

The manufacturing side has moved up the value chain quickly — electric vehicles, batteries, solar modules, machinery — and into overcapacity in several of them at once. Beijing's own term for the resulting price war is involution, and the policy response is consolidation in industries including steel, cement and photovoltaics.³

02Trade and exposure

Exports have been the offsetting force: they accounted for about a third of economic growth in a recent year, the highest share since 1997.³ The composition has shifted away from the United States, whose tariffs now fall on a wide range of Chinese goods, and towards south-east Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East.

Overcapacity at home turns into price pressure abroad, which is the mechanism behind the tariff and anti-dumping responses appearing across the pages of this site — the European Union's duties on Chinese electric vehicles being the case that drove the battery investment described on the Hungarian page.

03Energy and resources

China is the world's largest energy consumer, the largest importer of oil and gas, and simultaneously the largest builder of renewable capacity by a wide margin. Installed wind, solar, hydro and biomass reached about 2,340 gigawatts, close to sixty per cent of total generating capacity, and wind and solar capacity together now exceed thermal.⁴

Coal has not retreated in step. Thirty gigawatts of new coal plant were commissioned in the first half of 2026, up more than forty per cent on the year before, against 2.7 gigawatts retired,⁴ and the current five-year energy plan treats coal as security of supply rather than as a transitional fuel. Both things are true at once: the fastest renewable build in history, and continued coal expansion.

04Labour and demography

China's population began falling in 2022, the first decline since the famine years of 1959–61, and the working-age share has been shrinking for longer than that. The fertility rate is among the lowest in the world, and the pension system was designed for a very different age structure.⁵

The labour market also carries a structural mismatch: an expanding supply of university graduates against an economy whose employment growth has been in manufacturing and services that do not require degrees. This site carries no comparable Chinese unemployment series, which is itself part of the picture — the published rate covers urban surveyed unemployment only.

05Public finances

The visible public debt ratio understates the position. Explicit central and local government debt is heading towards about seventy-five per cent of GDP, up from roughly sixty-eight and a half per cent a year earlier,⁶ and beside it sit the local government financing vehicles whose borrowing built much of the infrastructure of the past two decades and whose revenue depended on selling land to the developers described in section 01.

The property downturn therefore hits local government revenue and local government debt service at the same time. Restructuring that obligation — swapping hidden debt into explicit bonds — has become one of the central fiscal exercises of the decade.

06Money and prices

The People's Bank of China is not an independent central bank in the sense the others on this site are: it operates under the State Council, and monetary policy is one instrument of an industrial and credit policy rather than a separate discipline. Its stance has been described as moderately loose, implemented through reserve requirement cuts and guided lending as much as through the policy rate shown above.³

Two constraints shape it. The currency is managed rather than floating, so lowering rates while the Federal Reserve holds risks capital outflow; and with households repairing their balance sheets after the property decline, cheaper credit has not translated into borrowing the way the textbook expects.

07What the models expect

These are computed on this site from each series' own history, and are nobody's official projection. The bar is the range the figure lands in half the time; the dot is the central path.

Replayed from past origins on today's revised figures, the same baseline was usually off by 0.47 on consumer price inflation, 0.10 on central bank policy rate.

08Structural indicators

The figures behind the sections above. They move by a point or two a year, so each carries the year it was measured.

09Sources and method

Live figures: OECD, Bank for International Settlements. Each is fetched nightly and validated before publication; the delivery report on /status/ says how old every one of them is. Profile written 2026-09-12, next review September 2027.

1. Property's share of output — China Banking News
2. The scale of the property downturn and its drag on growth — GAM, China housing market downturn
3. Exports' contribution to growth, overcapacity and the policy response, and the monetary stance — Goldman Sachs, 2026 outlook; China Industry Brief
4. Renewable capacity and continued coal commissioning — Inside Climate News, June 2026; Global Energy Monitor
5. Population decline and pension pressures — IMF working paper, February 2026
6. Explicit government debt — China Banking News