You misunderstood what Yu Yongding was saying. He was criticizing the neoliberal-centric solution to underconsumption which is to fuel more consumer lending. For example, the Chinese government is loosing restrictions on consumer lending on the grounds that “our household debt level is still not as high as the US and Japan!” as well as loosening the RRR to promote more commercial bank lending.

In fact, this is exactly what Western neoclassical economists want China to do when they say China has a consumption problem, which will only benefit the banking sector.

I am 100% behind investment on high tech economy, but we shouldn’t have to do this by sacrificing the welfare of the people. Can you give a reason why the Chinese working class should suffer from more working hours, higher retirement age, and depressed wages?

More investment isn’t going to solve that problem. The main problem is wealth inequality, and only by raising the wages of the working people can we work toward solving that. An over-supply of goods when the people are too poor to afford isn’t going to work, and will only increase reliance on the export sector because you now simply shift the consumption part to foreigners.

What I am proposing, from a Marx/MMT-centric view, is for the government to directly increase the wages of the working people, so that they have the purchasing power to directly consume the goods produced domestically, and even import from the other developing countries to help grow their economies. More importantly, this actually reduces wealth inequality because the Chinese economy has been structurally primed for the wealth to flow to the top.

This is a completely different model from the US credit-fueled consumption economy.

You`re welcome to link any other actual Marxists and their takes on China which btw I’ve never seen you actually do. This is an ideological battle in China, not just of good vs bad intentions.

I have literally posted graphs to explain my arguments lol!

I have also said before that my views are heavily influenced by Zuo Da Pei (左大培) and Jia Genliang (贾根良), who are actual Marxist economists and the latter also has the advantage of understanding MMT and List, which means you not only understand class dynamics (Marx), but also finance (MMT) and international trade (List) covering each other’s blind spots.

Roberts likes to show some graphs about Chinese consumption rising over the years without taking into account the role of debt. This kind of superficial view of the Chinese economy completely fails to capture the complexity of the many moving parts under the hood. This is no different than the Bidenomics people showing how the US GDP has grown so much while failing to address the fact that most of the consumption share in the US was contributed by the top 10%.

Household debt leverage of US vs China vs Japan (debt to disposable income ratio)

US = purple, China = red, Japan = brown

Notice that China’s household debt leverage had exceeded that of US and Japan around 2018-2019.

So, there is nothing unusual about China’s increasing consumption when people can afford to take on more debt i.e. when the economy is going well. However, with exports being stifled by potential tariffs, when over-investments in property market imploding, with local governments saddled with unprecedented debt, it becomes inevitable that consumption becomes the only channel for where the economy must flow (if you’ve been reading anything I’ve written before, you know the drill).

Most importantly, Roberts’s argument that China has no consumption problem cannot explain why there is a deflationary spiral in China. This is a serious issue because many businesses in China that have taken out big loans are getting squashed by the deflation. Roberts completely ignored this part as though there is no debt problem faced by the Chinese business.

While I don’t pretend to be able to fully address all these problems, my model that takes into account many of these moving parts can at least explain the deflation problem, why (over-)investment in industrial capacity has failed to translate into wage growth for the Chinese working class, why the Chinese leadership does not simply stop exporting to the US but to seek a trade truce with Trump, because China cannot afford the inflation to rise in the US.