Joshua Kurlantzick — Global economic crisis could bring down the Chinese government
Joshua Kurlantzick writes “Crash and Burn: How the global economic crisis could bring down the Chinese government.”
[snip]
And the global financial slowdown is already taking a terrible toll. Some 10,000 factories in southern China’s Pearl River Delta area had closed by the summer of 2008. Gordon Chang, a leading China analyst, estimates that 20,000 more will shutter by the end of this year.
In the third quarter of 2008, Beijing also reported its fifth consecutive quarterly drop in growth, and several private research firms expect a sharper slowdown next year. Additionally, unemployment is skyrocketing; in Wenzhou, one of the main exporting cities, about 20 percent of workers have lost their jobs, Reuters recently reported.
[via Memeorandum]