China feeling the heat of US Crisis

BEIJING: Short of food and running low on cash, a group of men huddled under a bridge in Beijing and waited for someone, anyone, to come by and offer them work-any work.

“This is the worst I’ve ever seen it,” said a day labourer in his 40s who, in better times, had often been hired for construction crews.
“Normally I can get a job in a few days, but I’ve been out of here a month already,” he said.

The suddenness with which the Chinese economy has lost momentum is Beijing’s immediate concern. Annual growth in the third quarter sank to 9 percent, well down from its scorching 11.9 percent pace in all of the last year and putting the country on track to record its first annual expansion since 2002 to be measured in single digits, not double digits.

Since then, the ravages of the global financial crisis have raised the spectre of the further slowdown, to 8 percent. Most countries would salivate at such growth, but for china it is a tipping point: Anything less, experts say, and the economy cannot create enough jobs to keep up with the mass of humanity, at least 15 million people, entering the labour market every year.

“If economic growth fell below 8 percent there would be tension, social tension, complaints and job losses,” said Chen Xingdong, chief economist at the BNP Paribas bank in Beijing.