地方债务：曾推动城市发展 如今成隐患: WSJ

choi

Lingling Wei and Bob Davis, 地方债务：曾推动城市发展 如今成隐患. 华尔街日报, Jan 25, 2015
cn.wsj.com/gb/20150128/cec135920.asp


, which is translated from

Lingling Wei and Bob Davis, Debt That Once Boosted Its Cities Now Burdens China. Wall Street Journal, Jan 28, 2015 (front page; article under the heading "'Slow-Motion Crisis'").
www.wsj.com/articles/debt-that-o ... ns-china-1422415981

Note:
(a) The title implies the one got encumbered (burdened) is "China"--not cities really.
(b) "The International Monetary Fund says China’s debt is growing more rapidly than debt in Japan, South Korea and the US did before they tumbled into deep recessions. Local-government borrowing is responsible for one-fourth of the buildup in China’s overall domestic debt since 2008. * * * Beijing has tried to contain local-debt growth since at least 2010. But according to IMF estimates, local-government debt reached 36% of GDP in 2013, double its share of GDP in 2008, and will increase to 52% of GDP in 2019."

Yuanyan Sophia Zhang and Steven Barnett, Fiscal Vulnerabilities and Risks from Local Government Finance in China. International Monetary Fund, January 2014 (working paper WP/14/4)
www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2014/wp1404.pdf
(“States, Japan, and Korea also went through a similar process during their”)
(i)
(A) “China’s debt is growing more rapidly than debt in Japan, South Korea and the US did before they tumbled into deep recessions”

At page 12, Figure 1 (whose heading was "Real Estate Investment in Local Government") showed in the upper right panel (a bar chart) whose legend stated: Real estate investment [in China] "is above the ratio that preceded market corrections in many other countries,” the y-axis being "Peak Residential Construction Investment (In percentage of GDP)": China (2012) at 9.5%, Japan (1973) at 8.7%, Korea (1991) at 8.4 and United States (2005) at 6.5%.
(B) In other words, the WSJ statement is not in the text, but rather in the panel, of this IMF essay.
(ii) I fail to identify the source of the statement: “according to IMF estimates, local-government debt reached 36% of GDP in 2013, double its share of GDP in 2008, and will increase to 52% of GDP in 2019.”

(c) “In Bozhou, an eastern city of 470,000 people, the government’s main financing company, Bozhou Construction Investment Group, raised 1.8 billion yuan from bond sales in May to help renovate shantytowns and build roads and bridges.”

安徽省 亳州市
(d) “Early in 2014, China’s premier and central-bank officials made clear that Beijing might allow some defaults, to chasten lenders and reduce credit growth. But as China’s economic growth fell below Beijing’s 7.5% target, willingness to allow defaults evaporated, say Chinese officials and economists. ‘It’s the Japan syndrome,’ says Fred Hu 胡祖六, chairman of Primavera Capital 春华资本集团, a Beijing private-equity firm. ‘You keep pushing off problems. That creates a crisis, but a slow-motion crisis.’”
(i) This is the origin of the heading: slow-motion crisis.
(ii)
(A) primavera
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primavera
(Primavera or La Primavera means the season spring in many Romance languages)
(B) Italian English dictionary

primavera (noun feminine; From Vulgar Latin primavera, from Latin [adjective masculine] primus [first] + [noun neuter] ver [spring]--Compare Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan primavera, Romanian primăvară, Old French primevoire, Occitan primver, Friulian Primevere, Romansch primavaira):
“spring, the season”
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/primavera