/biz/ - Business & Finance

The Chinese growth machine up until recently seemed to be twofold:
>1.) Attract western money to capitalize on its massive surplus of cheap labor
>2.) Invest heavily into infrastructure and property developments to capitalize on the endless domestic migration to urban areas.
Now, both of those money printers seem to have shut off. The property sector is having its Lehman moment on steroids.
>Migration to cities slows
>COVID solidifies the trend
>No one buys new houses, money raised from other projects has already been spent
>Countless people making payments on prepaid development plans that will never be built
>Millions of vacant units that will never be bought because the migration has ended
>All major property developers teetering on the brink of collapse, collectively owe billions of dollars each month they don't have
>Sector accounts for 30% of national GDP
And China is no longer the only gig in town for cheap manufacturing
>Vietnam and Indonesia can produce goods 7-10x cheaper
>Investment into China is faltering as tensions with US, Europe rise
>Paranoid CCP keeps scaring the private sector by randomly arresting business execs that they don't like
China has no serious assets that can make up for this.
>It isn't a significant exporter of anything aside from rare earth metals, which they are far from monopolizing
>Insanely vulnerable to energy prices
>Insanely vulnerable to food prices

Am I missing something? How can they get around this? Why are there so many neoliberal economists expecting China to just immediately go back to driving global growth?