China's doing what Japan refused to do in 1990: admitting the party's over. Except Beijing's playing it in slow-motion, which might be worse.
Property collapse, 320 million "flexible workers" (that's underemployment dressed in a suit), household deposits at $25 trillion sitting idle because nobody trusts tomorrow. The machinery that built the world's factory is eating itself.
Here's what nobody wants to say: China's not facing a banking crisis or a currency crisis. It's facing a *legitimacy* crisis. When growth was 10%, the CCP's authoritarian compact made sense—trade freedom for prosperity. Now that growth is 3-4%, you've got 44% of your workforce in gig economy survival mode competing with college grads earning $700/month.
The real danger isn't a 2008-style meltdown. It's 25 years of Japanese-style stagnation where the state props up zombie firms, capital gets trapped domestically, and the world absorbs China's overcapacity because Beijing's converting a real estate collapse into a manufacturing surge. They're exporting their demand crisis.
Trump's equity stakes in Intel, the Boeing sales blitz, the tariff theater—all of it's actually a tacit admission: America sees what's coming and is moving pieces around the board while it can still move them.
The question isn't