[josai]

Aren't you forgetting the small detail that China is literally ten times the size of Japan?

Even if your claim is true, and you don't present any evidence to that effect, the order of magnitude size difference makes it rather a different ball game.

[adventured]

No, I take that into account. China is ten times larger in population, but that doesn't mean they can grow ten times larger economically. There are limits to both sheer consumption / production within N amount of years in terms of how fast the global economy can grow, and limits in terms of how many resources a nation can realistically consume. For China to be ten times larger, they'd have to figure out how to produce the world's GDP almost twice over. It's impossible, the global economy in real terms is growing at a few points per year, China's growth must inherently move toward that line as it gets larger, just as the US has.

It's not hard to find evidence for China's boom being completely over. The best estimates on their actual GDP growth, already have them closer to 2-4% growth, if any growth at all if you go by trade volume / trains / baltic index / copper / construction / concrete etc.

Ten years ago they began to shift to massively taking on debt to continue to fake growth. Countries only do that when their organic growth is completely exhausted. It's exactly what Japan did when their bubbles began to unravel, and their money expansion began to implode. When the great recession hit, that was the end of the temporary consumption binge that drove most of China's 2000-2008 growth. Now they're arguably the most indebted nation in world history on a GDP ratio basis, and it's still getting worse, while companies are being artificially floated so banks don't have to own the vast bad loans outstanding, perfectly repeating what Japan did with zombie corporations.