Chinese officials love slogans. I was reminded of this at last month’s China Development Forum, an annual meeting of top Chinese officials, international business people and policy intellectuals. This year’s slogan is “the new normal”, a notion first advanced (to my knowledge) by McKinsey in 2009. Residents of high-income countries are now used to the idea that the performance of their economies has changed fundamentally. But what does new normal mean to the Chinese?
At the forum, Zhang Gaoli, the vice-premier and a member of the politburo, characterised it thus: first, “development remains China’s top task”, despite lower rates of growth; second, the old growth model “featuring high input, high energy consumption and over-dependence on external demand is no longer sustainable”; third, the Chinese still enjoy important “strategic opportunities”, and so “are fully confident about our future”.
Should we be as confident? I can see two big reasons why the answer should be “yes” and two why it might be “no”.