This is CBS Eye on the World. Here's John Batchelor.

With Gordon Chang, my colleague and co-host at Gordon G. Chang, and we're very pleased

here at the end of 2024 to welcome the author Anne Stevenson Yang. Her new book,

Wild Ride, China's short-lived experiment in capitalism. It begins in great promise in the 20th century,

and here it is in the 21st century and the Chinese miracle has vanished. Anne is here to tell the

story. We go immediately to a headline that's both

suggestive and puzzling. This is NBC reporting. What we have here is China stresses plans

to boost growth at top agenda setting meeting. And a very good evening to you. I read that as if something happened,

and yet the F.T, this is the irony from London, says there were no details whatsoever,

promised more at the National People's Congress than the new year. This has been a story that

keeps repeating itself. They come up with plans. They promise details.

They use the word stimulus. The market gets excited for about 20 minutes and then collapses.

Does this latest announcement look like more of the same or is there something new? Good evening to you,

Anne. Good evening, John. Yeah, I mean, look, what the markets here fail to grasp, I think,

is that the goal of the Chinese authorities, the Chinese Communist Party really, is to support the

state-owned banks and make sure that they don't default. And they have succeeded in that goal. Their goal is

not to make the economy roar ahead, which is not an achievable goal anyway. And what is the goal

to just kick the can if there's a Chinese expression such as kick the can? Yeah, well, I mean,

the banks own all of these really bad assets, which means loans to developers that have defaulted,

so they don't want the banks to default and you to go to your ATM and not be able to get cash.

So they just keep on rolling over some of these bad loans so that the banks will be able to roll them over.

Gordon, what China needs is what it used to have, investment from outside.

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