I'm John Batchel, and I welcome Joseph Sternberg, my colleague, he is a member of the

editorial board of the Wall Street Journal. He is in London. He writes the political economics column, and Joe's turned his attention to China and the troubles in China that can be described by Joe as a sluggish zombie economy. What is to be done?

First, the problem.

Joseph, a very good evening to you.

The property sector I've learned to say is a crater.

The consumer is not, at this point, adequately responding to the need for China to grow again.

Property crater, consumers on the sidelines, that leaves global trade.

And China has been boasting its global trade and boasting of its, you'd have to say, possession of

certain precious rare items that we need in high-end production, the rare earth, and boasting of its

advances in space, boasting of its quantum computing and where it's going with communications,

but it hasn't been addressing what you identify as the threat of Japanification.

What is that?

What is the threat represent? And is China listening now?

Good evening to you. Hey, John. So the issue with the comparison between Japan and China is that, of course,

Japan is now well into its fourth lost decade. Remember the story of that economy after the end of the war was that you had a couple

decades of phenomenally fast economic growth. And then, you know, that kind of culminated in a real

go-go decade in the 80s. One of the biggest signs of that was a huge real estate boom in Japan.

And then all of a sudden, that bubble collapsed. You had sort of a credit collapse associated with that.

And Japan's economy in a lot of ways is never really recovered from that.

I mean, first we were talking about one lost decade, then we were talking about a second lost decade, and then a third,

and now we're into the fourth, and all this time, economic growth has never really perked up

again. It's always been very difficult to achieve sustained wage growth, and you get people

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