The debate about whether China faces a hard or soft landing is little more than semantics to shareholders of the world’s miners, who have seen their stocks lose three-quarters of their value since 2011.
It is screamingly obvious, the bears say, that China is having a hard landing. Look at the Brazilian real against the dollar (down 60 per cent since 2011), industrial metals (down more than half even after a bounce yesterday) or European shares exposed to China (underperforming the wider market by 15 percentage points this year).
China bulls are undeterred. They point to the services sector, which has boomed even as industry has all but stagnated. Over the past year, almost all economic expansion has come from services, supported by agriculture.