From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Free Expression with Jerry Baker.

Hello and welcome to free expression from the Wall Street Journal Opinion page.

I'm Jerry Baker, editor at large of the journal.

Thanks very much for joining us.

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This week,

China's crisis. How serious are the economic woes facing the People's Republic of China?

Over the summer, the scale of the challenges facing Xi Jinping and the ruling Communist Party become dramatically clearer. China, remember, was supposed to bounce back this year after its

disastrously restrictive zero COVID lockdown policy was finally lifted at the end of last year.

But the recovery is really nowhere in sight. Manufacturing activities declining. Exports are falling.

Home prices are down. Consumer prices have dropped into deflation. Youth unemployment has reached

record highs.

Financial instability stalks the country, overbuilt real estate, has produced the collapse of

at least one major real estate company and is bringing down another. Massive debts at local

government level are making matters worse. Things look so grim that the parties are recently

deep-sixth, formerly publicly available economic data.

So what's going on? Is this merely a glitch in China's long progression towards what many

people have long argued would be its global economic ascendancy? Or is there something more

serious afoot? The structural weaknesses and contradictions in its communist parties-led economic model now

laid bare with really serious long-term economic consequences.

What does it all mean for the rest of us, particularly for US-China relations and the strategic

challenge that China poses?

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