Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

by Adam Tooze

Following the spectacular 2008 Olympics, the promptness and scale of China’s fiscal stimulus was further proof of the mobilizing capacity of the Communist regime. Compared with the sluggishness of many Western states, it is hard to avoid invidious comparisons. Both as presidential candidate and newly inaugurated president, Barack Obama referred frequently to China’s great strides in infrastructure.20 But this well-deserved credit should not obscure the tensions that lurked beneath the surface. In China the stimulus was deeply controversial. To many observers it seemed that, driven by a crisis in the West, the Chinese economy was being sucked in precisely the wrong direction. Was the stimulus a spectacular demonstration of state power, or further proof of the addiction of the Chinese power elite to an unsustainable growth model?21