2026年，我眼中的中国经济

Recently, while being busy with work, I've been listening on and off to programs on YouTube by some big and mid-sized influencers discussing the Chinese economy, including but not limited to the "Unclear Podcast" interviews with Li Houchen and Victor Shih, Mr. Sun of Political and Economic Matters, Wang Haibin's Financial Chat, as well as content from Lao Li Hai, Lao Zhou Hengmei, and Yelly Law, etc. To be honest, I agree with many of their observations at the surface level. After all, everyone is staring at the elephant in the room: the real estate downturn, employment pressure, tight local finances, and cautious consumer spending—these things are obvious at a glance. But when some of them start trying to explain the reasons behind these phenomena, my disagreements with them gradually become apparent, and the disagreements are even greater when it comes to judgments and predictions about the future. Therefore, I would also like to write down my own perspective for everyone's reference. In other words, I don't intend to deny the current difficulties, but I don't agree with their conclusion that the current difficulties can be directly extrapolated into long-term stagnation or even structural recession of the Chinese economy. At least for 2026, I don't think the situation will be as pessimistic as they describe.

How big is the gap between macro economic data and personal experience in China over the past few years? It's very significant. And are people's lives hard? Absolutely yes—these realities don't need sugarcoating. Since 2017, several once-mainstay industries—or traditional sectors capable of absorbing large-scale employment—have gradually entered downturn cycles, each with brutal, real-life consequences. In 2017, sweeping environmental policies in some regions forced massive chemical plants to shut down overnight. In 2018, China faced the first round of Trump-era trade tariffs head-on, dealing a major blow to traditional export industries. At the same time, real estate policies underwent drastic changes, the Asset Management New Rules were implemented, financial deleveraging tightened the non-standard financing system, and the paper wealth of many middle-to-high-income families was rapidly wiped out. That same year, the National Healthcare Security Administration was established, accelerating crackdowns on the medical and pharmaceutical industries, while regulations on K-12 education tutoring also hit suddenly. After a brief reprieve in 2019, the pandemic struck in 2020, devastating service sectors in large and medium-sized cities. In 2021, the "Three Red Lines" policy took effect, triggering systemic shockwaves across real estate developers and their entire supply chain—China's property bubble began to burst. In early 2022, delayed pandemic policy adjustments brought a second, deeper wave of impact. Then came Biden's continuation and intensification of supply chain decoupling and reshoring policies. And last year, Trump returned to the presidency, bringing renewed pressure from a second round of tariffs on China. The series of shocks included both deliberate policy shifts by China—on environmental protection, education, healthcare, real estate, and its tightly linked financial system—as well as external blows like the pandemic and trade wars. But a crucial point is that these shocks were not evenly distributed; they displayed a clear temporal stacking effect: the 2018–2019 policy tightening, the 2020–2022 pandemic impact, and the 2023–2024 real estate crisis—three waves of pressure creating a relentless drag, one after another. This is the true reason why the public's lived experience has been so intense. Regardless, the cumulative叠加 of these domestic and international policy events objectively eliminated momentum in traditional industries and pushed cyclical sectors to the bottom of their investment cycles. The tangible consequence has been the erosion of wealth for hundreds of millions of families, and the unemployment, pay cuts, and intensifying competition that tens of millions of households have had to confront.

In reviewing these phenomena and their historical causes, my judgment doesn't essentially differ from theirs. The real disagreement lies in another question: Why do China's macroeconomic data look acceptable these years, while individual perception is so poor? Some people explain it as data distortion or even fraud, but I don't agree with this simplistic attribution. The divergence between data and perception is essentially a statistical problem of "average masking distribution," not a matter of integrity. In contrast, a more explanatory approach starts with the transmission mechanism of prices and behaviors. From a macro perspective, taking the GDP deflator with the widest price coverage as an example, China's economy has been negative for several consecutive quarters since the second quarter of 2023, while the secondary industry deflator entered the negative range earlier, with a longer duration and a deeper decline. Since the fourth quarter of 2022, the deflator has recorded negative values for 12 consecutive quarters, and the negative growth rate far exceeds the overall GDP deflator. Such data inevitably means that the profit margin on the production side is being systematically compressed. When ex-factory prices continue to decline while nominal costs are rigid, the price signal no longer has an effective resource allocation function, and price transmission experiences friction or even failure on the supply side. To put it more bluntly: companies don't necessarily earn more by selling more, and may even lose more. This dilemma of "the harder you work, the more you get hurt" is the micro-source of perception.

In this environment, the optimal behavior for businesses is not expansion, but delay, observation, and defense. When businesses find that price reductions don't boost sales, and even when they do sell, they don't make a profit, capital expenditures are naturally compressed, payment terms are shortened, inventory management becomes extremely conservative, and financing structures lean towards low-risk, short-duration options. This is a typical rational choice under the combined effect of profit constraints and uncertainty aversion. Once this behavior becomes a consensus at the industry level, it will have a reverse effect on the household sector through investment, employment, and income expectations, further reinforcing the feeling that the economy is struggling. From a micro perspective, corporate investment willingness and household consumption willingness weaken simultaneously, and the growth rate of macro leverage slows down significantly, with the leveraging entity shifting from the private sector to the public sector. This means that after experiencing multiple shocks, the private sector is actively reducing risk exposure, choosing to repair balance sheets rather than continue to expand. This process often appears stable in macro statistics, but at the individual level, it manifests as layoffs, hiring freezes, and stagnant or even declining income growth. This paradox of "macro stability, micro coldness" is precisely a typical characteristic of the balance sheet recession stage—it's not that there's no money, but that there's no confidence to spend it.

Meanwhile, under low-interest-rate conditions, the net interest margin of the financial system has been continuously narrowing, with both risk-pricing ability and risk tolerance declining in tandem. Financial institutions are forced to compete downward, leading to highly concentrated allocations toward government-linked assets backed by fiscal credit. This means the total amount of money circulating in the financial system hasn't decreased—but within the existing institutional framework and expectations, the pool of assets that are widely accepted, held, and carry manageable tail risk has significantly shrunk. The result is severe overcrowding in a single "safe corner," while real SMEs across the economy face mounting financing constraints and rising borrowing costs. This "safe corner" primarily includes sovereign bonds, policy financial bonds, and urban investment platforms implicitly backed by government credit. When banks would rather buy 10-year treasury bonds yielding 2.5% than lend to manufacturing SMEs at 6%, the transmission mechanism of monetary policy has already suffered structural breakdown. This simultaneous financial overcrowding and real economy stagnation is essentially a structural misalignment—not merely a disconnect between data and lived experience. In this light, the gap between macro statistics and individual perceptions stems from asymmetric transmission of price, profit, and risk preference shifts across different economic layers. After all, macro data mostly record stocks and averages, while personal experiences focus on marginal changes and risk exposure. And when China is in a structural transition phase—where old drivers stall and new ones are just emerging—this gap tends to be systematically amplified. In short, we're in a transitional period where the old economy is bleeding, the new economy is generating blood, but the veins connecting them haven't been reconnected yet. The perceived pain is thus greater than the actual decline in overall economic conditions.

But let's be honest—does China's economy have nothing going for it aside from these challenges? Of course not. Precisely during the years when traditional industries stalled and cyclical sectors sank to their lowest, other sectors were quietly bottoming out and growing stronger globally. The problem is, this strength is mostly self-inflicted—intense competition driven by massive capital investment—yet hasn't yet translated into broad job creation or boosted domestic consumption and property prices. This huge energy hasn't spilled over into shopping traffic or housing markets. The structural disconnect—"strong production, weak consumption; strong exports, weak domestic demand; strong investment, weak employment"—is the key to understanding today's China. This isn't about total collapse, but stark divergence. For understanding China's emerging industries, this distinction is crucial. Otherwise, we'll easily mistake localized struggles for a universal doom, view natural market shakeouts in new sectors as systemic failures in old ones, and end up with all sorts of odd conclusions.

So, wrapping up here, let's talk about the future. By roughly categorizing industry performance over the past few years, we can identify three segments: policy-affected industries, cyclical industries, and strategically emerging industries. Policy-affected industries endure continuous disruptions from institutional and external environment changes; cyclical industries face fluctuations from capital expenditure and commodity cycles; strategically emerging industries grapple with mismatches in technological evolution and industrialization pace. These three forces combined create today's paradoxical landscape—apparently weak, yet hinting at a new structural shift. The key inflection point for 2026? Policy-affected industries may transition from "continuous disruption" to "adaptive equilibrium," cyclical industries are shifting from "old drivers" to "new drivers," and strategically emerging industries could cross the threshold from "investment phase" to "output phase."

For policy-affected industries, as policy shocks are gradually absorbed and industry consolidation nears its end, survivors will begin to enjoy pricing power restoration from improved competitive landscapes. Taking education, pharmaceuticals, and the internet as examples, the most intense phases of regulatory crackdown have likely passed; as shock frequency declines, traditional sectors are entering phases of cash flow recovery, expectation repair, and operational normalization. For cyclical industries, the core drivers are transitioning from the singular focus on property and infrastructure to a more comprehensive mix of domestic demand and new infrastructure. Combined with a more proactive fiscal stance, there's a solid basis for an investment cycle to restart. Meanwhile, the high growth momentum in non-ferrous metals, driven by electrification trends, may sustain longer. Meanwhile, China's strategic emerging industries are maturing from pilot trials toward scale and ecosystem development. Despite ongoing competition and market consolidation, their macroeconomic stabilizing role will become increasingly visible—particularly in new energy, NEVs, power equipment, and certain high-end manufacturing sectors, where China is no longer just a participant, but rather a shaper of rules and cost curves.

As for the turbulent international situation and the U.S.-China confrontation, I'm more inclined to see it as a dynamic equilibrium under pressure. With growing expectation of the upcoming Xi-Trump meeting, the marginal impact of shocks is diminishing. Since 2018, after multiple rounds of game-playing, Chinese enterprises have significantly strengthened their adaptability to external conditions: diversified supply chains, preemptive overseas capacity deployment, and a shift toward higher-value exports—these capabilities are now self-reconstructed. Meanwhile, the U.S. also faces constraints—prioritizing inflation control, the real costs of manufacturing reintegration, and the rigidity of global supply chains—all reducing the returns of extreme pressure tactics. Both sides must address their own domestic challenges, leading to a situation where tensions won't escalate but instead ease. This easing is crucial for China's economic recovery, as it reduces persistent external uncertainties that disrupt investment and employment, enabling domestic structural adjustments to proceed in a relatively controllable environment.

In today's context, the biggest danger for individuals isn't missing an opportunity or fleeing a place, nor being forced to turn life into a high-stakes gamble chasing every trend. We must clearly recognize that while macroeconomics cycle and industries evolve, personal life doesn't come with repeatable "window-of-opportunity" phases. So during this turbulent time, don't rush to chase chances—stay true to yourself and choose the life you genuinely want. That's the lowest-cost, long-term strategy: when uncertainty becomes the norm, what's truly rare isn't information or judgment, but stable skills, reusable abilities, sustainable rhythms, and the inner compass to stay grounded amid external noise. 2026 might be better—or it might bring massive black swans—but what matters more is this: no matter how it unfolds, don't let anxiety or your own inner uncertainty define your life.