Over the course of a decade spent reporting on the ground in China as a financial journalist, Dinny McMahon gradually came to the conclusion that the widely held belief in China’s inevitable economic ascent is dangerously wrong.
In this unprecedented deep dive, McMahon shows how, lurking behind the illusion of prosperity, China’s economic growth has been built on a staggering mountain of debt. While stories of newly built but empty cities, white elephant state projects, and a byzantine shadow banking system, have all become a regular fixture in the press in recent years, McMahon goes beyond the headlines to explain how such waste has been allowed to flourish, and why one of the most powerful governments in the world has been at a loss to stop it.
Dinny McMahon's spent more than a decade in China as a journalist covering the Chinese economy and financial systems for the Wall Street Journal and for the Dow Jones News Service. A native Australian, he is fluent in Mandarin. McMahon wrote China’s Great Wall of Debt while a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC. His new book is "China's Great Wall of Debt: Shadow Banks, Ghost Cities, Massive Loans, and the End of the Chinese Miracle."
