Timothy Beardson interview: It’s urgent that China reforms

Recent convulsions in China’s banks will not, I suspect, have surprised Timothy Beardson, a sinophile, veteran Hong Kong financier and author of Stumbling Giant: The Threats to China’s Future. He argues that China’s extraordinary growth over the last 30 years has come in spite of its banking system. A dinner party might speculate where China would be if not for Mao; but a more immediate question is: where would China be if its banking system supported the private sector?

“If the economy has grown by 10 per cent for 30 years, as is reported (and I think that the data in China is very frail – it probably hasn’t grown at 10 per cent a year – but it’s clearly grown at a very high rate and that’s all that matters). But if it had grown at 10 per cent a year and the private sector was 3 per cent of the economy [in 1980] and it’s now 60 or 70 per cent of the economy; then, by definition, the private sector has grown at 20 per cent a year.