In his CPPCC speech Xi Jinping said “For the future, we must treat domestic demand as the starting point”, which most analysts have interpreted to mean that China should depend less on foreign demand and more on domestic demand. This makes...
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202005/26/WS5ecc5f9aa310a8b2411585f6.html

...sense – foreign demand will be weak, and deficit countries more reluctant than ever to allow surplus countries to get a disproportionate share of total demand – but as far as I can tell most of the reforms he discussed are supply-side reforms, i.e. creating new growth...

...drivers through tax cuts, more favorable financing from commercial banks, faster progress in advancing the development of the digital economy, intelligent manufacturing, health, new materials and other strategic emerging industries, and an injunction to “greatly promote...

...innovation in science, technology and other areas”.

China has mainly relied on supply-side reforms to grow for most of the past four decades, and while this made sense when China was underinvested and had excess demand, this hasn’t been the case for at least a decade. What...

...China needs is not further supply-side reforms but substantial demand-side reforms – which mostly means rebalancing the distribution of income in favor of consumers – but so far, except for regular promises to strengthen consumption, I haven’t seen a lot of real proposals...

...that will have that effect. It is true that local governments have been issuing consumption coupons, and there are regular promises to force local governments to strengthen the social safety net, but not only have the efforts so far been minimal, in either case they are...

...being funded by debt, so they don’t really resolve the underlying problem of weak demand in China. China (like most other countries, by the way) relies on soaring debt to keep demand growing, but clearly this isn’t sustainable.