Speaker

Logan Wright

Logan Wright

China analyst at the Rhodium Group and author of Broken China (2026). Wright has studied China’s political economy since moving there in 2001, beginning with interviews on exchange-rate reform and the financial system, and has worked through the full arc of China’s post-WTO integration, its post-2008 credit boom, and the subsequent structural decline he now argues is the defining feature of the economy.

Wright’s distinctive contribution is to read China through a macrofinancial lens rather than a political one. Where most analysts start from the political system — a one-party state with a technocratic elite capable of long-term planning — Wright starts from the credit cycle, and argues that the largest credit boom and bust in at least a century has left Chinese policymakers with impaired tools and far less capacity to control outcomes than either the “China rising” or the “China contained” narratives assume.

Core positions

China’s economy is structurally broken, not in a temporary slowdown. The financial system facilitated China’s growth, served as a shock absorber for the political system, and now constrains it. The capacity of the leadership to control economic outcomes is far more limited than four or five years ago. This is the consequence of a credit bust, not a policy choice that can be reversed.

The “China rise is inevitable” narrative is propaganda, and it is wrong. Headline GDP overstated growth by failing to incorporate the property-sector collapse (a 40% drop in new housing starts in 2022). Real growth is probably near zero in 2026. In nominal terms — which is what repays debt and drives reinvestment — the United States has outgrown China over the last five years.

The reform path was genuinely convergent until about 2011–2012. The Western narrative that China was never going to reform, and the Chinese narrative that the West is containing China, are both wrong. The turn was contingent on choices made in Beijing — around the Arab Spring panic, the Bo Xilai incident — not structurally inevitable.

Moral hazard was strategy, then it collapsed. The post-GFC credit expansion ($24–27 trillion, 2008–2016) ran on an implicit government guarantee. The guarantee collapsed in a cascade — peer-to-peer lending (2018), small banks (2019), trust companies (2020), property developers (2021), mortgages (2022), local government financing vehicles (2023) — and credit demand collapsed with it, from a flight to risk to a flight to quality.

In the wiki