Club Lunch: Why Has China’s Economy Not Collapsed? China’s X-Factor

Why has China not collapsed? This question has driven Mr. Peyman’s work for decades, especially after the spread of predictions of China’s imminent economic demise. Mr. Peyman has discovered a surprising answer in the most unlikely of places, traditional Chinese philosophy. This is China’s X-Factor. Recurring short-term alarm about financial fragility, from shadow banking to ghost cities, escalating debt and roads-to-nowhere, constantly misses the point, whereas the Yi Jing, the Book of Change, and other parts of traditional philosophy have successfully lit China’s path to economic development. Ironically, this has much in common with the ideas that powered Western economic dominance for two centuries, including long-term thinking, vision, clearly agreed goals, gradualism, flexibility and pragmatism. In his new book, China’s Change: The Greatest Show on Earth, Peyman explores how Chinese families, firms and governments have managed change for millennia.

Mr. Peyman came to Hong Kong in 1977 with Reuters before joining the Far Eastern Economic Review in 1979, where he worked in Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur as financial and business correspondent. An emerging markets pioneer, he headed Asian research ex-Japan for Merrill Lynch and Dresdner Kleinwort Benson before founding Research Works in 1999 to provide independent, long-term analysis for investors in Asia. He has lived in Shanghai since 2002, when he moved there to observe what for anyone interested in economics, business and social development was clearly going to be The Greatest Show on Earth.