Job seekers at a Spring Job Fair in Jinbao International Convention and Exhibition Center, Shandong Province, March 2021. Credit: Imaginechina via AP Images
The first thing they teach you in China-watcher school is that social stability is everything. That was certainly the case during the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, the mild global recession of the early 2000s, the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-09, and the Covid-related collapse of 2020. And it is very much the case today. In each of those earlier instances, Chinese policymakers moved aggressively to temper mounting unemployment to preserve social stability. That reaction is all the more evident today.
There is an important difference between then and now. The earlier threats arose largely from external shocks that China was able to cushion successfully, mainly through aggressive, pro-active fiscal policy stimulus focused on infrastructure spending. The current threat is more homegrown, an internal shock arising from a confluence of unforced policy errors — especially zero-Covid pandemic mitigation, regulatory pressures on private sector Internet platform co
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