Liam Dann, Business Editor at Large for New Zealand’s Herald, works as a writer, columnist, radio commentator and as a presenter and producer of videos and podcasts.
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I’m told the 18th-century compound was recently the backdrop for a hit historical drama series. So there are unusually large numbers of young people here.
Many of the young women are dressed in full traditional imperial-era costumes and are putting no small effort into getting perfect images for their social media accounts.
Old China meets new. There’s some symbolism there somewhere.
There’s no question that a lively youth culture is to the fore of Chinese life when you walk around its major cities.
There’s the wacky pop cultural world of Labubu dolls and weirdly flavoured milk teas.
But there’s also a definite resurgence of youthful enthusiasm for traditional Chinese culture.
Upbeat T-shirt slogan Beijing, 2025
Anyway, I’m struck by the slogan on the T-shirt.
It seems like a good proxy for the modern Chinese economic outlook.
I’d say it’s China’s modern economic outlook, but apart from a brief dalliance with hardcore Marxism in the mid-20th century, the pursuit of wealth and fortune seems to be an ancient cultural trait.
Prince Gong’s garden is full of lucky symbols for wealth and prosperity – a bat-shaped lake, money trees and loads of golden carp.
The kid with his catchy English language slogan shirt couldn’t be more appropriately dressed.
Coming to grand conclusions about China or its economy, based on the short visits that journalists tend to do, is a trap.
You can’t understand any country with a short visit, let alone one on the enormous scale of China.
But here we go anyway ...
In September, I headed up to China for my first visit in a decade: Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen in six days, with a packed itinerary of economic officials, big infrastructure projects, robots, artificial intelligence (AI) centres and other high-tech operations.
On trips like this, the best a journalist can do to avoid the trap is to try to integrate their experiences with the reports and analysis they read to create a more three-dimensional picture.
The twin notions on that T-shirt, perseverance and economic progress, are ever-present in the discussions we have on our media tour.
It’s a duality that seems embedded in the national character. It’s reinforced in the language used by Chinese President Xi Jinping.
As a nationalistic mantra, it doesn’t bode well for US President Donald Trump and his efforts to force a Chinese backdown in the trade war.
Making China great again
There’s another slogan you’ll hear a lot in China these days.
Chuan Jianguo. It’s a running joke that translates literally as “Trump the nation-builder”.
In context, it is a sarcastic play on Trump’s US Maga slogan “Make America Great Again”.
It’s the Chinese nickname for Donald Trump, which says a lot about how the trade war is going for the US.
The term actually originated in Trump’s first term.
However, it has persisted and, if anything, has grown in relevance as Trump has escalated his trade war with China.
If Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) were unpopular after the long and painful Covid lockdowns, Trump and his attacks on China have gone a long way to remedy that.
Trump’s trade war seems to have inspired a new wave of nationalism and the timing couldn’t have been better for the CCP.
Those kids being photographed in traditional costumes are part of a wider trend called Guochao.
It literally translates to “national trend” but colloquially means something like “China chic”.
It’s a trend that has been building for a decade, but has been accelerated by the trade war and negative perceptions around American brands.
It blends traditional Chinese culture with 21st-century streetwear, pop culture and design aesthetics.
It’s cool to buy local.
Consider, for example, Chinese coffee culture.
It might have been built by Western brands like Starbucks. But it has been co-opted and taken over by new Chinese brands like Luckin Coffee.
Luckin is now the fastest-growing coffee brand in China and has surpassed Starbucks, which is now struggling to grow.
I don’t know if the coffee is much different, but the hipster cachet of the takeaway cup now rests with the local brand.
Downtown Shanghai and central Beijing have a vibrant pop culture and consumer buzz about them.
The gadgets and fashion are more comparable with what I grew up associating with Japanese youth culture.
The Communist Party’s relationship with youth culture is complex. Going back to the Cultural Revolution, it has never been shy of making the most of it.
A decade of progress?
I first visited China in 2013 with the New Zealand China Friendship Society. I went up again in 2015 with the New Zealand China Council.
So one of the obvious things to consider on my trip this year is: what’s changed?
The idea behind Guochao and Chuan Jianguo is one obvious shift. There’s a new confidence and pride in China that doesn’t seem to come from any official CCP proclamations.
That’s not to say there isn’t dissatisfaction and economic difficulties.
Youth unemployment is somewhere near 20%.
It’s a grim reality that the colourful pop culture trend in the big cities can mask.
It’s well documented that GDP growth has also slowed in the past decade.
In 2013, China’s economy was growing at about 8% a year. Now that rate is just shy of 5%.
But given how much bigger the economy is now, that lower rate of growth still equates to more nominal growth. Perhaps as much as $200 billion more this year.
However much we want to talk about the notion of a Chinese economic downturn, that kind of growth on that sized economy remains more than enough to accommodate New Zealand’s export ambitions.
I’ll come back to that much-talked-about downturn and how relevant (or not) it is to us.
What else has changed in a decade?
Beijing’s air quality has improved greatly. Official enthusiasm for the adoption of green technology and the fight against climate change now seems deeply embedded in the culture.
There’s still plenty of dirty coal being burned to keep the lights on in Western China but the public stance and ambition of all new policy puts environmental improvement to the fore.
In the modern wealth parts of China I saw, the policy is working.
Even the traffic seemed a little less chaotic – although more so in Shanghai than in Beijing.
Shanghai. Photo / Unsplash
In Shanghai, where the skyline across the Huangpu River is greatly enhanced after a decade of building, the downtown traffic also seems far less ostentatious.
In 2015, the place was gridlocked with Lamborghinis and Bentleys, Roll-Royces and Ferraris.
The wealth on display was jaw-dropping.
“There are a lot of luxury cars sitting in storage,” I’m told by one economist when I ponder the shift.
There are a lot more electric vehicles (EVs) on the road.
Chinese passion for tech generally – EVs, AI, robots, drones and driverless cars – is unrelenting.
There’s a sense that China’s march to a technology-based society is unstoppable.
There’s no point fighting it, so get on board.
There’s also a pragmatism to the technological arms race with the US.
An economist at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences tells me the US “may have better technology but it is behind on the application of technology”.
In other words, while America is thinking about developing new tech, China is thinking about how to use it.
How big is China?
I want to look at some geography and demographics. It’s important because Kiwis often get an unrealistic impression of China by visiting central Beijing, Shanghai and other big east coast cities.
That’s a bit like going to Midtown Manhattan or Hollywood Boulevard and trying to understand America.
Some very big numbers can help put things in perspective, even if we don’t have time to take a slow train across Western China.
But first, it’s good to remind ourselves that New Zealand is not a small country. It’s a big country with hardly any people.
At an off-the-record briefing from the Bric group (the business roundtable in China), one of the slides presented overlays a map of New Zealand on the east coast of China. It stretches from Beijing to Guangzhou.
Of course, that region of China has more than 200 million people in it.
There’s no comparison when it comes to the relative size of the markets.
Tier-one megacities like Shanghai are the primary markets for New Zealand goods.
But it’s also worth considering that New Zealand is also a much more urbanised nation than China.
That can seem a bit incongruous when you are in the middle of a city of 28 million people.
It’s also jarring, when you’ve just been shown around the latest infrastructure marvel or high-tech facility full of robots, to hear Chinese economists talk about New Zealand as a developed nation – relative to China’s “developing” status.
But they are right.
In 1978, China’s GDP was roughly $73 billion. Last year it was $33 trillion.
But it’s per capita where the numbers make most sense.
In 1980, China’s GDP per capita was estimated to be less than $500 a year. It is currently $23,000.
In New Zealand last year, GDP per capita was around $80,000.
Per capita, New Zealand is a richer, more developed and more urban country.
About 87% of New Zealand’s population lives in cities.
Shanghai. Photo / Unsplash
That’s a higher percentage of our population who live in cities than is the case in South Korea, Taiwan, the US, Germany or Britain.
In China, that figure is just 65%. It feels intuitively hard to believe.
Most New Zealanders see a vibrant consumer-based economy in China, which may be a symptom of the fact that we tend to visit the central areas of the two or three biggest cities.
About 564 million people are living along China’s prosperous and highly urbanised eastern coastline.
But that still leaves almost 900 million to fill out the rest of the country.
In many cases, these are people living more traditional Chinese lives, surviving on much lower wages.
These are the people we don’t see on short junkets.
The point here is that despite enormous growth in nominal GDP, China still has a long way to go to transform its economy.
The great rebalancing
Back in 2013, China was in the grip of the “great rebalancing”.
The mantra I heard from economists and officials was that China was shifting from export-led growth to the domestic economy, from manufacturing and heavy industry to services and technology.
It would mean an appreciating renminbi (RMB) and a further opening of Chinese markets to foreign capital.
The trend would effectively guarantee strong GDP growth as increasingly more people became urban consumers.
In 2025, it is notable that the story really hasn’t changed much in a decade.
China’s manufacturing and export economy continues to surge ahead.
Despite the trade war, China’s exports rose 8% in the year to September.
Meanwhile, consumption as a percentage of GDP is stagnating.
Household consumption as a percentage of GDP was around 40% in 2023.
It has gone backwards since the pandemic.
Property meltdown
The meltdown of the Chinese residential property market has been well-documented and is widely cited as a major reason for the slump in consumer spending.
A report from Goldman Sachs this year estimated prices have fallen 20% over the past four years and could decline another 10% before bottoming out in 2027.
That’s at odds with the messaging in China.
I heard from several officials and economists that property prices bottomed out in September.
Later, I learned that there was a Government initiative in September 2024. A series of support measures was unveiled to boost the struggling sector.
But the effect was temporary and prices started sliding again this year.
The market didn’t stick to the official script.
Regardless, the property slump is framed by officials as a necessary correction.
It is described as something the Government could resolve but chooses not to because it wants to rebalance the way Chinese people invest.
There might be something to that. It will be a familiar debate to Kiwis as we wrestle with our own version of a residential property slump.
Deflation or involution
With manufacturing still booming and consumption stalled, China faces some big deflationary issues.
But when I ask one economist about China’s problem with deflation, he denies it has one.
That seems odd, given that China’s ever-accelerating manufacturing of new consumer goods keeps pushing prices down.
In combination with an ageing population, the kind of deflationary economic problems that Japan has experienced in the past few decades seem pressing.
It turns out, for whatever reason, deflation just isn’t the widely accepted way to describe China’s economic problems.
But another word is very much in vogue.
Involution – or neijuan – is a term that refers to excessive and self-defeating competition among Chinese companies for limited resources and opportunities.
An official anti-involution campaign was launched by the CCP in 2024. So it’s a problem that officials are much more comfortable discussing.
Involution looks very much like a deflationary problem. But it frames the problem as something that can be corrected with a policy adjustment and a change in attitude.
Suddenly, the problem presents as an opportunity. A challenge that, when solved by the collective effort of the Chinese people, will ensure stronger economic progress.
It’s a very Chinese way of looking at a complex and multifaceted issue.
As with the property slump, it is all about readjustment, subtle shifts in policy direction without ever actually changing course.
Like the T-shirt says, China will keep trying and enrich itself.
In September, Liam Dann travelled to China with the support of the New Zealand China Council.
Part two of this series will look at New Zealand’s relationship with China
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