I'm not sure it's that odd a comment - I've seen arguments that China is going to run into problems with too much debt, poor infrastructure projects and the like for 30 years or so and it so far hasn't really happened. There are a number of reasons why:
Firstly as mentioned there has been a lot of real economic growth. I was there around 1983 when GDP per capita was about $300, there were almost no cars and hardly enough food. Now they are the worlds largest economy by PPP GDP with 4WDs, air pollution and the like.
Secondly the debt is mostly in Yuan which the government can print. 3rd world countries typically go bust when they borrow in foreign currency. With China I believe it's the other way around - they hold a lot of US bonds so the US effectively owes dollars to China, not the other way around.
Thirdly the socialist system for better or worse means the government can just delay paying debt. In the west if developers borrow billions to build empty flats them and or the banks that lent to them go bust, in China they just give them another decade to pay. This can lead to misallocation of capital - all the resources going to useless empty flats rather than productive stuff but seeing the first point about GDP it can't be too bad.
The above is economic reality. Some stuff does keep going up - entropy, US GDP per capita with occasional blips and maybe Chinese GDP with blips also.
Firstly as mentioned there has been a lot of real economic growth. I was there around 1983 when GDP per capita was about $300, there were almost no cars and hardly enough food. Now they are the worlds largest economy by PPP GDP with 4WDs, air pollution and the like.
Secondly the debt is mostly in Yuan which the government can print. 3rd world countries typically go bust when they borrow in foreign currency. With China I believe it's the other way around - they hold a lot of US bonds so the US effectively owes dollars to China, not the other way around.
Thirdly the socialist system for better or worse means the government can just delay paying debt. In the west if developers borrow billions to build empty flats them and or the banks that lent to them go bust, in China they just give them another decade to pay. This can lead to misallocation of capital - all the resources going to useless empty flats rather than productive stuff but seeing the first point about GDP it can't be too bad.
The above is economic reality. Some stuff does keep going up - entropy, US GDP per capita with occasional blips and maybe Chinese GDP with blips also.