China: an economic crisis looming shake the m

Unless you are a fan of the great moments of the history of Communist China, you have probably not heard of Wuhan, the site of the legendary swimming across the Yangtze by Mao.

But perhaps more than any other Chinese city tells the story of how, after three decades of remarkable modernization and enrichment in China, its economic miracle seems to be coming to an end and why there is a serious risk of a catastrophic crisis.

Mayor Tang Liangzhi says it is spending $ 330,000 over five years in a development plan aimed at making Wuhan, which now has a population of 10 million in a mega global city and a major opponent of Shanghai, the second city of China

The city center is being demolished to create a high-tech business district. It will include a skyscraper over 600 meters of $ 5,000 million, which will be the second or third highest in the world.

But of course, the purpose of my visit to Wuhan was to tell a larger story.

In recent years, China has built a new skyscraper every five days, more than 30 airports, subways in 25 cities, the three longest bridges in the world, nearly 10,000 kilometers of lines TGV, 42,000 kilometers of highways and developments commercial and residential real estate in an inconceivable scale.

THIRD WAVE There are two ways to see a reconstruction of the landscape that would have intimidated the Egyptian pharaohs and Romans. It is a necessary modernization of a country in a rapidly urbanizing. But it is also a symptom of an unbalanced economy, the sources of recent growth are not sustainable.

The obvious economic slowdown in China, along with recent manifestations of stress in financial markets can be seen as the third wave of the global financial crisis that began in 2007-08 (the first wave was the collapse of Wall Street and the City London 2007-08 and the second, the crisis in the Eurozone).

WHY IS SAID THIS? After the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 there was a sudden and dramatic decline in world trade. And that was catastrophic for China, whose growth has been generated largely by exports to rich Western craved all those things. When our economies failed, we stop buying and the almost overnight, turned off the light factories throughout China.

I visited China at the time and witnessed the crowds of poor migrant workers packing up all their possessions, including children on their backs, and heading to their villages. It was alarming to the government and threatened to break the implicit contract between the ruling Communist Party and the Chinese people to renounce their democratic rights in order to enrich themselves.