As China's first full year of rebalancing draws to close, how has President Xi Jinping done?
Reasonably well, it seems. Growth appears to be moderating gently, stocks continue to soar and most economists still foresee a soft landing rather than market-shaking meltdown for the world's second-largest economy.
Next year, however, Xi's team will have to get to the hard stuff: taming an opaque, unwieldy financial system. My question isn't so much whether China will or won't crash. It's whether the rest of Asia is ready for the possibility of 5 percent or even 4 percent Chinese growth, as predicted by pundits like Larry Summers and Marc Faber. It's almost certainly not.
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