Is China Headed for a Hard Landing?

The news from China in recent weeks has been dire. Strikes and protests — some of them violent and involving as many as ten thousand people — are reported almost daily. Millions of workers are being thrown out of their jobs, and economic indicators seem to presage more gloom, with electricity production for industry falling 4% in October, the first time it has declined in a decade. Even the country's seemingly insatiable thirst for oil to fuel its decades' long boom seems to be fading: China's national oil company said late in November that demand had declined "sharply" in recent months as industrial production slowed and was set to fall further.

So is China — the "fragile superpower" as one historian memorably called it — about to experience the one thing its leaders and many analysts and academics outside the country have feared for years: a violent contraction in its economy that some fear could spark widespread social unrest among its billion inhabitants?

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