Don’t look for slowing growth to push China toward the West

By John Lloyd

Reuters - April 16, 2015

China’s gross domestic product growth has slowed to 7 percent, it was announced this week. That’s somewhat anaemic when compared to what the world has come to expect from the second-largest economy.
Its exports have dipped even more sharply. That’s partly because the genuinely anaemic economies of Europe are importing less, and partly because China’s domestic consumption has risen, now accounting for more of GDP than exports.
That’s part of the plan: Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli told the China Development Forum last month that the old growth model “featuring high input, high energy consumption and over-dependence on external demand is no longer sustainable.”
Zhang speaks from a position of great authority, he is a Politburo member, after all. Though China’s huge growth is largely because, for the past three decades, it’s gone capitalist — read “socialism with Chinese characteristics” — its Communist Party, and the Politburo, still remain in charge. President Xi Jinping, whose power is formally — and likely in practice — greater than any Chinese leader since Mao Zedong, is proof of the institution’s strength.

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