There is a specific kind of administrative fiction that governs the modern world, a dreary theater where numbers on a spreadsheet are presented as evidence of vitality while the patient on the table is actively gangrenous. The latest dispatch from the Middle Kingdom provides the perfect script for this farce. We are told, with the straight-faced solemnity of a mortician explaining why the casket is closed, that China’s economy grew by roughly 5 percent last year. Applause, please. The target was met. The bureaucrats in Beijing can sleep soundly, wrapped in the warm, comforting blanket of met metrics.

However, if one bothers to look past the headline number—a task that seems beyond the capacity of the slobbering golden retrievers masquerading as financial analysts on cable news—the picture is less a portrait of health and more a scene from a Hieronymus Bosch painting, assuming Bosch painted unfinished high-rises and weeping homeowners. The engine of this “growth” is not prosperity; it is panic. The Chinese economy has essentially achieved its arbitrary statistical goal by eviscerating the life savings of its own population and then vomiting the resulting excess capacity onto the rest of the world in the form of cheap exports.

Let’s dissect the corpse properly. The real estate sector in China, once the golden goose that laid concrete eggs, has crashed with the grace of a drunk falling down an elevator shaft. For decades, the average Chinese citizen—distrustful of their own stock market, which operates with the integrity of a rigged carnival game—poured their wealth into property. Apartments were not homes; they were bank accounts made of drywall and glass. They were the retirement plan, the status symbol, and the collective delusion of a billion people. Now, prices are in freefall. The savings of millions of households have simply evaporated, turned into digital dust. The “wealth effect” has reversed, leaving a populace that feels poorer, bleaker, and significantly less likely to buy the consumer garbage that keeps the global carousel spinning.

In a sane world, or perhaps just a world not run by sociopaths, this evaporation of domestic wealth would be a signal to rethink the strategy. But we do not live in a sane world; we live in an economy managed by people who view human suffering as an externality to be hedged against. Since the Chinese people are too broke to buy things, the state has pivoted back to the oldest trick in the mercantilist playbook: making things for the foreigners. Exports are the savior here. The 5 percent growth figure was dragged across the finish line by a surge in manufacturing meant for export, compensating for the cratering domestic demand.

This is where the international comedy of errors truly begins. The West, in its infinite hypocrisy, will moan about “dumping” and “market distortion.” Politicians in Washington and Brussels will stand on their soapboxes, veins bulging, decrying the flood of Chinese EVs, solar panels, and cheap consumer electronics. They will feign outrage that China is exporting its deflation to our shores. Yet, watch the consumer. Watch the very voters these politicians claim to protect. They will insatiably devour these cheap goods because their own purchasing power has been eroded by the inflation their own governments created. It is a symbiotic circle of stupidity: China destroys its middle class to subsidize the consumption of a Western middle class that is slowly being destroyed by its own corporate overlords.

To the cynic—which is the only intellectual position currently defensible—the “5 percent” victory is a grim joke. It represents the triumph of the system over the individual. It proves that you can obliterate the net worth of your citizenry, leave them holding the bag on mortgages for apartments that are worth a fraction of what they paid, and still post a GDP win if you just ship enough cargo containers to Los Angeles and Rotterdam. The State wins; the people lose. This is the universal constant of the twenty-first century, whether you are in Beijing, New York, or London.

So, spare me the analysis of “resilience” or “recovery.” There is no recovery here. There is only a desperate shifting of deck chairs. The real estate market, a Ponzi scheme built on the assumption that trees grow to the sky, has hit the ceiling. The pivot to exports is a stopgap, a way to keep the factories humming so the workers don't start asking difficult questions about where their money went. The world economy is currently being propped up by the frantic production of a country trying to outrun its own bad debt. We are all participating in this charade, buying the output of their desperation, nodding at the 5 percent figure, and pretending that the foundation isn't rotting away beneath us all.