Go to the poor place of the water, and sit and watch the clouds rise.
When you choose the right direction and really work hard to implement, you will definitely encounter unexpected difficulties and make you confused.
And just when you are so confused that you don't know what to do, the situation becomes clear again before you know it.
The premise of the premise is that you choose the right direction, go the right way, and believe in yourself and keep going.
With this in mind, we will get some encouraging confirmation and enlightenment when we look at the economic development performance of China and the United States over a period of time.
Newsweek compared the contrasting trends of the Chinese and American economies in the first quarter.
In the first quarter, the U.S. economy grew just 1.6% year-on-year, below Wall Street's forecast of 2.4% and down from 3.4% in October-December 2023.
China's economy grew at an annualized rate of 5.3 percent in the January-March period, 0.6 percent higher than analysts polled by Reuters had forecasted.
That is, the US economy was 0.8 points below expectations, while the Chinese economy was 0.6 points higher than expected.
The U.S. economy, which should have been better, was not better.
China's economy, which I didn't think was so good, got better unexpectedly.
The world's largest and second largest economies have just seen a reverse cross-development of one positive and one negative.
Momentary data hardly reflect the real problem. What can reflect the problem is the development momentum, the trend, and the driving force and factors behind the data to support this development.
And this trend behind it seems to further confirm this contrasting trend between China and the United States.
Newsweek wrote:
Against the backdrop of rising inflation and falling public and government spending, this figure (the rate of economic growth in the United States in the first quarter) marks the slowest growth rate in two years.
Jeffrey Roach, chief economist at LPL Finance, told Consumer News & Business Channel: "The economy is likely to slow further over the next few quarters as consumers may approach the end of their splurge spending." ”
This passage reveals several meanings.
1 Newsweek believes that the low economic growth rate in the United States in the first quarter is mainly due to the decline in public and government spending.
The implication is that the economic growth of the United States in the past few years has all been supported by public spending and government support? Didn't we always say that consumption was strong?
In fact, only when public and government spending is strong, the overall economic environment will be good, and consumers will have the confidence to spend, which is one aspect; the other aspect is that when there is more public and government spending, the money will gradually flow to different economic circles and consumers, and consumers will have money to earn and spend.
2 Consumers have run out of money to splurge.
Roach, an economist interviewed in the article, said the U.S. economy will have to slow down next because consumers may be nearing the "end of their squandering spending." Why don't consumers squander all of a sudden? Because the government doesn't spend, and if the government doesn't spend, consumers won't make money, they won't have money to squander, it's as simple as that.
Therefore, after the prosperity of the United States in the past two years, the Federal Reserve has only squandered and supported everyone with national debt. It's basically that Yin eats grain.
However, Americans have long been accustomed to this kind of philosophy of life and human truth that spends tomorrow's silver and makes tomorrow have no money to spend.
Newsweek also found a striking reason for why China's economy is growing.
Several of China's world-leading industries saw significant growth in the last quarter. For example, the production of electric vehicle charging stations increased by 41.7 percent, and electrical components increased by 39.5 percent.
Newsweek has even learned China's most fashionable vocabulary, the new qualitative productivity.
Beijing believes that 'new productivity' will replace real estate and infrastructure and drive gross domestic product (GDP) growth.
However, Newsweek disagrees with this, and through the comments of George Magnus, an economist at the China Center at the University of Oxford, he pointed out that China is "daydreaming", and they are just islands of excellent technology in the midst of macroeconomic difficulties.
Revelation
Although experts Newsweek and economists at the University of Oxford do not agree with China's economic growth prospects. However, the points they mentioned do give us some inspiration.
That's right, China's economy has indeed experienced some difficulties recently, and even made us feel lost for a while.
However, when we look back now, these difficulties have gradually become a thing of the past, and we finally see the way to the future, and it is not the way back and the old road that we have walked in the past.
The difficulties we encountered, internally, were the unsustainable real estate economy of the past. Even if you want to go back in time, the first is hard, and the second is that its side effects are very large.
But to find a new alternative to the growth of real estate volume, we have not been able to see. Infrastructure construction has gone through a wave, and it is difficult to build it on a large scale now.
However, the emergence and rapid growth of the new energy industry, as well as China's global leadership in this area, give us renewed hope.
Indeed, the construction of road and bridge infrastructure in the past has been basically completed, but the construction of new energy capacity is promising, its volume is large enough, and this industry can involve almost every industry and every field, and every region needs such industries and production capacity. Not only China needs it, but it also needs it abroad.
This industry and production capacity, if well developed, can support our development in the next five to ten years.
And it's the next five to 10 years that will be crucial for us, a very necessary high-end transition period before we can get to the top of technology.
The new energy industry can not only drive the development and renewal of infrastructure construction, but also bring the growth of our green and renewable energy.
In the future, computing resources such as artificial intelligence and cloud computing will require a large amount of clean energy. This is very important for our future layout.
At the same time, the development of new energy can also bring about the development of our vast western region, make use of the western region, and expand our economic coverage.
The difficulty we have encountered externally is how we can rearrange our global supply chain after the United States focuses on decoupling and breaking the chain and transferring the industrial chain.
The new energy industry is our main product to open up the new pattern of global trade and supply chain.
The so-called global supply chain and trade system, it all needs a typical product to open up this channel first. New energy is this product, which is an industry with leading technology, complete industrial chain and large scale in the world.
Once other countries in the world need China's new energy products and make a business, then other transactions in the future can be improved through such channels. The entire trade chain is opened.
Therefore, through the new energy industry, our foreign economic dilemma can also be opened. It can be described as killing two birds with one stone.
Therefore, compared with the economies of China and the United States, the United States will lose momentum because public spending is exhausted and can no longer drive consumption.
China, on the other hand, has stumbled out of its own confusion and forged a new path, a path of sustainable development, and the days to come will get better and better day by day.
This is the trend of reverse cross-cutting between China and the United States.
Interestingly, in order to give the United States a long face, Newsweek also specifically mentioned that China's economy is declining as a percentage of U.S. GDP in terms of nominal GDP, which means that China may "never" be able to surpass the United States, but the gap is getting wider.
However, even Newsweek itself admits that this nominal GDP is not inflation-free.
In other words, the total size of the U.S. economy is getting bigger, but most of it is caused by inflation. And it is too self-deceiving for the United States to even hope for such a nominal lead over China.
What's more, there is also the issue of the exchange rate of the US dollar and the yuan. As the U.S. dollar has been raising interest rates, the exchange rate has risen, causing the gap in U.S. dollar GDP to widen. However, the US dollar interest rate hike is obviously unsustainable.
In fact, in terms of purchasing power, China's economy has long surpassed that of the United States.
It's just that we don't need to compare ourselves with the United States.
As long as we find our own development path and development rhythm, it is stronger than anything else.