Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo is the latest member of the Biden administration to make a pilgrimage to China in recent months, joining the likes of Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, and “climate tsar” John Kerry (whose team swears he flew commercial).
Raimondo’s meetings with Chinese officials in Beijing and Shanghai this week seek to ease economic tensions between the two largest global economies, embroiled in what some consider a burgeoning cold war. Meanwhile, domestically, the Chinese economy appears to be having difficulty trudging on, at least compared to China’s modern standards.
Since the end of the Great Recession, China’s annual GDP growth has sat between 6 and 10 percent. In 2023, however, China’s economic growth is hovering at around 3 percent. In part, that is a consequence of the nation’s vain struggle for Covid zero—rolling lockdowns remained in place through the beginning of this year. China’s service sector lost 12 million jobs in total from 2020 to 2022.
Ending the lockdowns has not resulted in the consumption-fueled stimulus that many Chinese officials hoped would wake the slumbering economy, a development that points to potentially more serious and structural problems. Local governments and state-owned enterprises are heavily burdened with debt and underwhelming productivity levels. China’s manufacturing industry is in the midst of decline. Exports have followed, as has direct investment.
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