Amid growing indications that China’s rapidly expanding public and private debt foreshadows a major economic and financial upheaval in the future, the latest official GDP quarterly data is stimulating divergent views from analysts. According to Beijing, GDP grew by a “better than expected”  7.4 percent in Q1 of 2014. However, this is a further indicator that official growth in China is slowing, as Q4 of 2013 revealed GDP growth of 7.7 percent.

Two things to keep in mind; China’s statistics, as in many other economies, are opaque, perhaps much more so with Beijing. Additionally, the Chinese economy functions with far different dynamics than is the case with a Western advanced economy. Official GDP growth reflects massive infrastructure spending funded by credit expansion, alongside export-based manufacturing growth, with consumer spending a low component of economic activity in comparison with Western countries.

What does seem clear is that the economy’s double digit growth rates of the past are over, the trend in GDP growth is a slowdown, supposedly engineered by Beijing to lay the foundation for more sustainable growth in the future. However, declining GDP growth  rates combined with increasing signs of a looming debt crisis add further doubts about the future health of the world’s second largest economy

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There is increasing concern at the rise in public and private debt in China relative to GDP. This concern is across the board: internal and external, public policymakers and private financial interests and investors. Some commentators are following the path of false optimism; no matter the size of China’s debt, the second largest economy in the world has the capacity to contain the problem-so they claim. That remains to be seen.

By some estimates,  Chinese financial institutions are holding up to $3 trillion is bad or at least questionable debt, equivalent to America’s subprime mortgages that exploded in 2008, ushering in the global economic crisis. If Beijing is unable to contain the growing debt problem and it were to explode, the contagion would be at least as virulent as the impact on the global economy due to the subprime meltdown in the United States.

Of all the somber economic trends underway-and there are many-China’s accumulating public and private debt problems are the most vexatious.

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According to a survey recently conducted by Reuters of 945 Chinese companies outside of the banking  and financial services sector, corporate debt in China increased by 260 percent over a 5-year period. This rate of increase within the corporate sector that is occurring in China is unprecedented; no other nation’s example demonstrates such a cascade of corporate debt among any other major economy over a similar period of time.

At present, corporate debt in China outside financial services has reached the staggering level of 12 trillion dollars. This is equal to 120 percent of China’s GDP, and about 15 percent of global GDP. This is a startling figure of corporate leverage in China, and comes on top of the rapid rise  in local government debt in China, which I discussed in a previous blog post. There are implications of a worldwide character for this massive accumulation of private and public debt in China, which cannot have its impact in the entire global economy.

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While much of the discourse on public debt and deficits among economists and media pundits has been related to  the Eurozone Crisis, especially regarding Greece, or major developed economies such as the United States and Japan, much less has been heard about China’s fiscal status. Yet, one of the most rapidly growing factors of public debt is occurring right now, in China, largely under the radar of the so-called fiscal prophets of doom.

At present, according to always questionable  official statistics from Beijing, China’s total public debt represents 58 percent of the nation’s GDP. This is significantly lower than is the case with Japan and the United States. However, it is the rate of growth of that debt, particularly in connection with Chinese local governing authorities, that may begin to sound alarm bells. It appears that following the global economic and financial crisis of 2008, cities across China embarked on a massive borrowing and spending binge in a super-charged Keynesian effort to sustain China’s traditional  high annual rate of economic growth.

China’s  National Audit Office (NAO), following directives from the national authorities in  Beijing, undertook an extensive accounting and auditing of the books of all of  the nation’s local spending authorities. What they discovered was that in only three years, China’s local public debt grew by a staggering 70 percent, reaching a total of 17.7 trillion yuan, equivalent to nearly three trillion U.S. dollars. Another statistic is sounding alarm bells in China; up to 80 percent of all bank lending in China during the period following the onset of the global economic crisis was to local governments.

The vast spending spree by city governments across China has erected vast quantities of housing stock and commercial edifices that are unoccupied and infrastructure projects that are underutilized. Some economists, particularly outside of China, may defend this massive and largely uncontrolled public debt expansion as enlightened public policy, aimed at preventing high rates of unemployment in China. However, China’s national leadership is clearly worried about this stunning rate of growth in public debt at the local level, far outstripping real economic growth rates.  Beijing knows that seeding official GDP growth rates with an  unrestrained tidal wave of red ink is not a sustainable economic path to pursue. The dilemma for Beijing’s economic policymakers is this; now that they know  they have a serious problem of exploding public debt, what options are open to them that impose the least degradation to their cherished high rate of annual GDP growth? Their ultimate answer will inevitably have profound implications for the entire global economy.

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