China's Slowdown

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Josef Joffe, China's Slowdown. History shows that every economic miracle eventually loses its magic. How much longer can China sustain such astounding growth?  Wall Street Journal, Oct 26, 2013.
http://online.wsj.com/news/artic ... 4579151511303083436

(a) Excerpt in the windows of print:

'Guided' capitalism plants the seeds of its own demise. Vested interests first ignore change and then resist it.

China still has advantages, like forced capital accumulation and suppressed consumption.

(b) Quote:

(i) "Authoritarian or 'guided' modernization plants the seeds of its own demise. The system moves mountains in its youth but eventually hardens into a mountain range itself—stony, impenetrable and immovable. It empowers vested interests that, like privileged players throughout history, first ignore and then resist change because it poses a mortal threat to their status and income.

"This sort of 'rent seeking' is visible in every such society. As the social scientist Francis Fukuyama explains, reflecting on the French ancien régime: 'In such a society, the elites spend all of their time trying to capture public office in order to secure a rent for themselves'—that is, more riches than a free market would grant.

(ii) "China still has many millions of people poised to leave rural poverty behind, so don't confuse it with Japan, whose shrinking and aging population won't be replenished soon by immigration or procreation. Japan ranks at the bottom of the world fertility table, one notch above Taiwan and one below South Korea. Call it East Asia's 'death wish.' China's 'reserve army' still has a long way to go. Nor has this very poor country exhausted the classical advantages of state capitalism, such as forced capital accumulation, suppressed consumption and a cavalier disregard for the environment.

"But beware the curse of 2015. Despite its rural masses yearning to go urban, China's workforce will start to decline while its legion of graying dependents keeps ballooning—the result of an abysmally low fertility rate, better health and rising life expectancy. As China gets older, America will become younger thanks to its high rates of birth and immigration. An aging society implies not only a smaller workforce but also a changing cultural balance between those who seek safety and stability and those who want to risk and acquire—traits that are the invisible drivers of economic growth.

(c) Note:
(i) The Jewish (eastern Ashkenazic) surnames Joffe/Jaffe are "from Hebrew yafe ‘beautiful’, ‘pleasant.’"
(ii) Mr Josef Joffe is "the editor of Die Zeit,"
(A) German-English dictionary:
die (definite article): feminine and plural form of "der"
zeit (noun feminine; plural: zeiten): "time"
(B) Die Zeit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Zeit
(literally "The Time" or "Times")

(iii) rent-seeking
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
("The phenomenon of rent-seeking in connection with monopolies was first formally identified in 1967 by Gordon Tullock.[7] The expression rent-seeking was coined in 1974 by Anne Krueger. The word "rent" does not refer here to payment on a lease but stems instead from Adam Smith's division of incomes into profit, wage, and rent [payment to a land owner")
(iv) There is no need to read the rest. No translation yet in cn.wsj.com.