CHINA/ECONOMY/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “At a news conference, the president answered a question about healing national divides by saying, falsely, that he had forced China to back down from a plan to strengthen its manufacturing industry…This is exaggerated. It’s true that China’s growth is slowing. The economy expanded 6.5 percent in the three months that ended in September, the slowest pace in almost a decade. (Those are the official numbers, at least. Many economists believe Beijing’s statistics are implausibly smooth and do not square with outside estimates.) But even if China’s growth rate hadn’t slowed, the country was hardly about to eclipse the United States in two years. Last year, Chinese economic output totaled $12.2 trillion, according to the World Bank. The American economy’s output totaled $19.4 trillion. Assuming the two economies kept growing at last year’s rates, it would still take around a decade for China to surpass the United States.”
–Raymond Zhong, “Fact-Checking Trump’s Claims About the Chinese Economy,” The New York Times online, November 9, 2018