A Delicate Balance in Beijing

Beijing talks of a shift to an internal consumption-based economy, one less susceptible to the vagaries of international trade and overall more self-sustaining. But this is not a simple change, particularly in a country where the government is dictating the transition to take place over a very short span of time. Decades of redundancies and inefficiencies in the economy, significant overcapacity in some sectors and undercapacity in others, and a pervasive culture of local self-interest and corruption further complicate the desired transition....