China enters 2022 with a bit less swagger than a year earlier. A roaring economic comeback then has since been tripped up by Covid-19 lockdowns, energy shortages and a cooling property market. Declining births and worsening international relations cloud the longer-term outlook.
But what alarms some close observers of China’s economy isn’t any one of these challenges: It’s the government’s unpredictable and heavy-handed process for dealing with them. Last year, this manifested itself in sudden and disruptive bans on online tutoring, campaigns against effeminate celebrities, on-and-off restrictions on burning coal and regulatory assaults on consumer Internet companies.
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