How about this for a contrarian view of China:
Lin further breaks from the economic consensus when he advocates for what China should do: he argues that growth should continue to be led by investment rather than consumption. His fear is that consumption without investment — especially investment in industrial upgrading, environmental protection, tech innovation, and infrastructure improvement — will restrain productivity growth. And without healthy productivity growth, incomes will remain low and therefore the expected consumption-led growth won’t materialise. Here was a bullet point on one of his slides: “China has plenty of resources for investments: accumulated fiscal debts of less than 60% of GDP, private savings of 50% of GDP annuallly, and $3.5 trillion foreign reserves”.
China and traditional industrialisation-led development: the world was not enough | FT Alphaville
Lin goes on to argue that China could, like Japan and Korea before it, still rely on investment and export to grow incomes. However:
While small countries such as South Korea, Taiwan, or even Japan, have shown that they can continue to drive growth through exports for many decades (and to levels of GDP per capita relative to the US much higher than is currently the case in China), in part this has been due to their small size and limited impact on the markets on which they rely. Even after decades of export-led growth, an economy the size of South Korea is far from a dominant player in the broad import share for Europe and the US. In contrast, despite GDP per capita only increasing to a still-modest 25% of that seen in the US, China now accounts for fully a third of global industrial production (up from only 5% as recently as the 1990s)–see Exhibit 5.
China and traditional industrialisation-led development: the world was not enough | FT Alphaville