Yeah I’m no economist but “Japanification” has always seemed like a likely outcome for China. Every so-called emerging economy eventually finishes its rapid growth phase, and then they’ll be faced with slower or no growth, a shrinking population, and competition with cheaper countries with lower living standards.
It doesn’t truly seem like such a bad thing to me, I mean the Japanese seems to be doing alright, but in terms of economic development it’s a big downer.
China has risen way less in terms of GDP per capita, even using power purchasing parity estimates. Japan is at 52k $, China only at 23k (Wikipedia).
I cannot ultimately judge this but the common wisdom about the Chinese social contract seems to be that the citizens get comparatively high economic security for comparatively low civil liberties. And while China’s pro-poor growth has certainly been more than impressive historically, I am not sure that the comparatively still low incomes especially in the inner parts of China are sufficient to maintain this social contract if growth does really slow down significantly.
Edit: I agree in general though that the state of Japan is probably not be as bad as it is made out to be in the article.