The West's Manufactured Anxiety Over China's Growth
The Financial Times, like many Western publications, frames China's economic growth target as a 'global problem.' This perspective suggests that Beijing's domestic policy decisions, aimed at improving living standards for its 1.4 billion citizens, are somehow destabilizing the international order. This portrayal conveniently sidesteps the historical reality of Western-driven globalization, which
has often prioritized the extraction of resources and cheap labor from the Global South to fuel consumption in developed nations. Such pronouncements ignore the persistent double standard. While Western nations regularly pursue high growth, often through speculative markets and military-industrial expansion, China's efforts, particularly post-Mao Zedong, are immediately tagged with suspicion. For
example, the United States consistently seeks to maintain its economic hegemony, demonstrated by the Bretton Woods system established in 1944, which cemented the dollar's dominance and facilitated American economic projection worldwide. When China aims for a modest 5% growth, suddenly it becomes an ‘overproduction’ crisis, despite internal demands for infrastructure, innovation, and social welfare
programs still far exceeding those in many developed countries. The underlying claim is that China's exports, a consequence of this growth, will 'flood' global markets. This assertion conveniently omits the fact that Western economies have long relied on cheap Chinese goods to maintain low inflation and high consumer spending, a fundamental aspect of their own economic models for decades.