China’s economic troubles aren’t going away anytime soon and there’s plenty of blame to go around. The rebound in consumer demand that many expected after COVID restrictions were lifted hasn’t materialized. Its aging population isn’t helping, and there are sluggish exports, record levels of youth unemployment and massive government debts.

Straight Arrow News contributor Larry Lindsey believes China’s government is partly responsible.

Let’s start with the supply chain. We know here that [the] supply chain is actually still getting back to normal. It’s largely back but not completely. It took a long time. And we learned that supply chains are complicated spiderwebs. Now in a market system, the entire market is geared toward trying to undo those supply chain bottlenecks. That’s what entrepreneurs and businessmen do.

In China, instead, they tried to do it from the top down. And they made things worse. For example, they had felt threatened by some of the big tech executives in their country. A number of them met untimely deaths, falling off the tops of buildings, for example. And even the very well known Jack Ma, who headed Alibaba, basically disappeared for two years. He wasn’t apparently harmed, but you never saw him in public. And in the meantime, various parts of the Chinese state took half of his companies. 

Well, that doesn’t make your supply chain work any better. It’s entrepreneurs who run the country. And I think they’re belatedly waking up to that and some of Jack Ma’s associates are now put back in charge of Alibaba.

But the supply chain problems are much worse in China because of their own internal system.