Since the pandemic China on Western TVs is about to "collapse". However, what I saw is new EVs, new Phones, record high exports, record high solar panels installations, new metros/airports etc...
Something must be very wrong in your assessment, right?
I like Michael Pettis's analysis, though I'll grant you that the distortions he cites in the Chinese economy have gone on longer than he predicted possible. But the health of the Chinese economy is not just the visible things you cite, but also the distribution of assets and balance sheets in the economy.
Per Pettis (and other sources), the banking system is dealing with a large debt overhang in society. Pettis's proposed policy fix is to assign that debt to the state, to state-owned-enterprises, or to the corporate sector. Because the long-term growth of China's economy depends on being less reliant on exports, and having a more "normal" mix of domestic demand. There are nuances there, but Pettis does a better job than I do in explaining it.
The trouble is that it's not politically expedient to assign the losses due to (unrealized) bad debt to those entities. And the result is a slow, grinding failure in the housing sector. The government does have a tight lid on dissent, but I understand that the Chinese people are in a more precarious position than they should be due to many households having overinvested in nonproductive real estate projects. How that unwinds will be fascinating to watch, and extremely relevant to world economics and geopolitics.
To be clear, I really am hoping for the best for China and its people. The right policy is sometimes well-known but hard to execute, and that's the tragedy. (It's playing out now, in spectacular style, in the US.)
China exports, per capita, around as much as Tunisia where I am from. It does, however, have a way higher gdp per capita. Per capita, China ranks at 104 far from most developed and developing countries. For some Chinese, exports are their bread and butter but for most Chinese, they are only dealing locally.
This does, in some opinions, explain the surge in their exports. As their internal market (which is their primary market) slowed down, they turned to exports. This might suggest that something is wrong with their economy, however: 1. it's not clear if it is as bad as the 2008 crisis in the US. and 2. the 2008 crisis was bad but not the end of the world. The US had a rather good decade afterward.
A more succinct point: the US economy looked really strong in mid-2008. Consumption was very strong, but it turns out that consumption was fueled by unsustainable debt.
China has a serious debt problem in its economy. Not government debt like in the US, but shadow banking debt. My fear, based on reading Pettis primarily, is that the Chinese people will end up paying for that debt. Households that have expensive second homes as investment vehicles will suffer those losses (since there isn't sufficient population to fill those homes), unless those losses are socialized or redistributed.
> Since the pandemic China on Western TVs is about to "collapse". However, what I saw is new EVs, new Phones, record high exports, record high solar panels installations, new metros/airports etc...
This pre-dates the pandemic by 20 years. There are articles as far back as 2000 that detail the impending collapse Chinese civilisation. To the point where it's now become a meme (the economist are notoriously known for their bad predictions on this subject)
Something must be very wrong in your assessment, right?