China will be “fine”, but it needs to be noted that the “Keynesian” approach during the 2009 GFC by printing 4 trillion yuan stimulus can no longer be replicated today. It gave rise to the many problems that China is facing today.

The reason was that the stimulus was pumped into the economy when the real sector went into a slump (reduced consumption from America which was served by the Chinese export industries). As a result, most of the stimulus money went into infrastructure building and real estate market (which did not exist in China before 2008).

This is why you see so many infrastructures like high speed rails and new cities (“ghost cities”) cropping up across China in the 2010s. It directly stimulated the utilization of raw materials like concrete production, as well as infrastructure building sectors. It also allowed the local governments, whose finances had been hit hard by the GFC and the slump in the real sector, to make quick cash by selling land to property developers. It also drove up GDP numbers so many local governments would compete with one another by selling more and more lands, building more and more properties even knowing that they can not be filled in the long run. It was a way of “gaming” the system to get promoted and receive more funding from the central government.

These actions would eventually precipitate in the real estate bubble and the local government debt crisis that China is facing today.

But today’s China has a very different problem: the problem of excess housing and “ghost cities”. There are many housing properties that could not be sold, and will not be sold, and will be left empty for a long time. You might have heard stories about the ghost cities being filled up eventually, but many of those cities were actually planned around the early 2000s (for example, Binhai New Area in Tianjin, Zhengdong New Area in Zhengzhou etc.), and also rare exceptions like Pudong New Area in Shanghai that benefits from being a prime location. There are many new cities that were initiated in the 2010s that will never see their properties filled up.

So now the infrastructure building route is a dead end. Building more properties would be a waste of resources because nobody is ever going to live in them, and many infrastructures like high speed rails are good but they are not strong enough stimulus to drive the entire economy. You need people to consume (buy stuff) to drive the local economy.

This is why transitioning into a domestic consumption economy, and abandoning the export oriented economy, is the most straightforward way of decoupling from the US. It’s painful to radically re-orientate the industries you have built up over the decades, and it’s painful to abandon the export revenues, but the US imperialists are betting precisely on China procrastinating on initiating a transformative change to its own economic system.