雌性:China’s Economy Faces Obstacles in Rebalancin...

CHENGDU, China — A casual glance out the window is all it takes to witness the blistering growth that has become the signature feature of this provincial capital and of other cities in the vast Chinese interior. A phalanx of half-finished office and apartment towers flanked by yellow cranes rises above the brown waters of the Jinjiang River.

China has vowed repeatedly, most recently during the just-concluded visit by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who met in this city with Vice President Xi Jinping, to overhaul its state-directed growth model and empower its consumers to spend more on their own, something that would makes its economy more sustainable and help the sluggish world economy as well. But leaders in Beijing and places like Chengdu are finding it difficult to steer China away from growth that relies largely on infrastructure projects, construction and export manufacturing, economists and financial analysts say.

“China’s leaders are committed to altering their country’s macroeconomic landscape,” Evan A. Feigenbaum, a China analyst at Eurasia Group, a global consulting firm, said in a statement attached to a report released Aug. 17. “But the country’s political economy will not change as fundamentally as many in China and abroad hope. And the next decade is likely to be more fraught than conventional wisdom suspects.”

China has incentives to change its model: its economic policies contribute to wasted resources, vast social inequality and a soaring inflation, which leaders fear will fuel social instability. The consumer price index went up 6.4 percent year-on-year in June, the biggest jump in three years. The 12th Five-Year Plan, a blueprint for development from 2011-15, gives an outline for better distributing economic growth across the country, and thus giving households more spending power.

Yao Yang, an economist at Peking University, said Chinese leaders knew that the domestic economy put too much money in the hands of corporations and the government. They agree that they have to increase social welfare to encourage domestic consumption and dampen mass discontent.

But there are obstacles that limit the ability of leaders to shift direction. For one thing, China continues to empower its large state-owned enterprises at the expense of private entrepreneurs, which results in market inefficiencies on where and how capital should be allocated, analysts say. Those large enterprises have enormous influence on policy makers. State banks also tend to favor government-backed projects, which are often capital-intensive endeavors like infrastructure building.

At the provincial and lower levels, one reason officials support capital-intensive projects arises from the way such officials are measured by the central government in annual reports. The rate of local G.D.P. growth is a top criterion by which the officials are judged. Their careers depend on it, and capital-intensive projects give short-term lifts to growth numbers. Another reason officials promote such projects is corruption: it is relatively easy to take bribes or skim money from large state investment projects.

To cope with the global downturn in 2008, the central government pumped $586 billion of stimulus money into the economy and loosened lending by state banks. Companies set up by local governments borrowed heavily. Victor Shih, a Northwestern University professor, said that based on official figures released this summer, total local government debt across China is $2.4 trillion to $3.1 trillion. The upper estimate is equal to half of China’s G.D.P. in 2010. Interest payments on the debt amount to more than $150 billion per year.

“Right now, the banks are encouraged to ‘restructure’ all of this debt such that little of it will become nonperforming loans,” Mr. Shih said in an e-mail. “However, there might be a problem if inflation is high or if deposits continue to leave the banks’ balance sheets.”

In the first half of 2011, even Chengdu, whose 15 million residents have a reputation as laid-back, tea-drinking, spicy-food-loving sybarites, had an impressive 15.1 percent real growth rate that was significantly higher than the national average, according to an official report. Such rapid growth in an interior city can help with economic rebalancing. It redistributes wealth and shifts consumer spending away from the much wealthier coast. But it raises questions about the local economic model.

Critics point to Wuhan, whose growth rate matches that of Chengdu, and the piles of debt it has accumulated through investment in fixed assets like factories, roads and bridges. State banks have been lending liberally to companies created by local officials that make these investments. This kind of lending does not show up on Wuhan’s balance sheets.

“Investment is growing too fast and too strong, and that leads to a deterioration in the quality and efficiency of the investments,” said Bai Chong-en, vice dean of the School of Economics and Management at Tsinghua University in Beijing. “It will be very difficult to improve both of them in the short term.”

On the issue of exports, Mr. Biden and other American officials have been pressing China to let its currency, the renminbi, appreciate so that Chinese goods do not have an unfair advantage in the global marketplace. The renminbi has risen 7 percent since June 2010, which American officials say is not enough, though there are conflicting reports by Western economists on whether greater appreciation would have any real benefit for American industries. The currency has been appreciating at a slightly faster rate recently, perhaps partly because raising the value of the renminbi makes imported goods less expensive in China, and that helps tamp down inflation.

Mr. Yao, of Peking University, also said the aging of China’s 1.3 billion people, and the dwindling of its pool of young, cheap labor, “naturally means more domestic consumption and less exports, therefore going towards a more balanced economy.”

The debate over rebalancing China’s economy comes at a particularly tense time in the nation’s political life, so there is little political will to push ahead with economic reforms, analysts say. A leadership transition is expected to take place in late 2012, and jockeying is under way for positions in the Politburo and its elite Standing Committee. So senior officials will gravitate toward maintaining the status quo and supporting conservative policies.

Even though Mr. Xi is almost certain to get the top leadership job, he may forfeit his chance if he makes a severe misstep.

Moreover, powerful and wealthy interest groups like state-owned enterprises will work to prevent redistribution of capital and assets, analysts say.

The authors of the Eurasia Group report wrote that although Beijing would meet some of its goals, “ultimately, the country’s leaders lack the political stomach and sense of the moment to implement a comprehensive and ambitious rebalancing agenda.”