The story told in this graph is important. If you set a GDP growth target and you cannot get consumption to grow faster than the target, then you also cannot allow investment to grow more slowly than the target except to the extent that a rising trade surplus takes up the slack.
By the late 2010s China was already worried about excess manufacturing capacity and the private sector was cutting back on manufacturing investment.
But the collapse in property investment after 2021 changed all of that. In order to keep overall investment from slowing, the authorities forced a massive increase in manufacturing investment whose purpose was not to satisfy unmet demand but rather to balance the decline in property investment.
The consequence shouldn't have been nearly as surprising as it was for many: excess manufacturing capacity exploded into the problem of involution. But as involution forces down the growth rate of manufacturing investment, even as the growth rate of consumption continues to lag, this leaves China with three possible outcomes:
1. Miss the GDP growth target, which is what has been happening in recent momths, but this is probably politically unacceptable.
2. Increase non-manufacturing investment, although with property investment still declining, this basically means more infrastructure investment. I expect this will happen in the second half of 2026, but given that China already so much excess capacity in infrastructure, it isn't east to find investment projects that aren't value-destroying in the aggregate. As one of my academic friends said jokingly last week, thank god for the terrible rainstorms.
3. Run ever larger trade surpluses.
The arithmetic is pretty easy to set out. China must get investment growth to slow sharply, perhaps even to go negative, if it has any hope of reining in debt, but there are only two ways this can happens.
One way is with a surge in consumption growth that balances the slowdown in investment growth by enough to meet its long-term 4% growth target, but this seems unlikely, at best. The other way is without a surge in consumption, which means allowing GDP growth to drop.
Until then, we can think of the growing trade surplus as effectively a residual consequence of the attempt to rein in debt (i.e. non-productive investment) without reducing GDP growth.