The boldest of Chinese President Xi Jinping's reform proposals, which were introduced ten years ago, called for a shift to a free market economy based on consumption and services in the West by 2020.
The 60-point agenda was intended to fix an outmoded development model more suitable for developing nations, but the majority of those changes have failed, leaving the economy heavily dependent on outdated policies that have only increased China's enormous debt burden and industrial overcapacity.
The failure to restructure the second-largest economy in the world has sparked serious concerns about China's future.
The possibility of a more severe crunch exists even if many economists believe that a steady incline towards stagnation akin to that in Japan is the most likely scenario.
According to William Hurst, the Chong Hua Professor of Chinese Development at the University of Cambridge, "Things always fail slowly before they suddenly break."
The Chinese government would suffer very large social and political costs in the short term from a banking crisis or other type of economic disaster. There will eventually need to be a reckoning.
China's Maoist planned economy ended in the 1980s, leaving behind a predominantly rural people that was in dire need of infrastructure and manufacturing.
According to economists, it had already satisfied the majority of its investment requirements for its stage of development by the time the global financial crisis struck in 2008–2009.
Since then, while total debt has increased nine times, the nominal size of the economy has increased by four. In order to maintain its high growth rate in the 2010s, China increased its investment in real estate and infrastructure at the expense of consumer spending.
Due to this, consumer demand has remained weaker as a percentage of GDP than in most other nations, and job growth has been focused in the industrial and construction sectors—careers that young university graduates are increasingly turning their backs on.