After two decades of 10 per cent GDP growth, followed by average growth of over 8 per cent, conventional wisdom is that China is on the verge of collapse. But that wisdom is based largely on many misunderstandings.

Let’s start with the consensus that China’s residential property market is about to replicate the U.S. housing crisis. But China has avoided most of the U.S. traps. For example, homeowner leverage is far lower in China than it was in the U.S. during the run-up to the crisis. By 2006, the National Association of Realtors reported that the median cash down payment for first-time homebuyers in the U.S. was only 2 per cent of the purchase price. In China, the minimum down payment is 30 per cent.

Another consensus holds that Chinese banks are on the verge of their own “Lehman moment.” But the products that broke Lehman Brothers—and caused havoc through the U.S. financial system—do not exist in China. There are no subprime mortgages and there are very few mortgage-backed securities. There is no secondary securitisation, so no collateralised debt or loan obligations (CDOs and CLOs). And China’s banks are very liquid, with deposits equal to 140 per cent of GDP, compared to 55 per cent in the U.S. Moreover, all Chinese banks are government banks, and there is no doubt that the Communist Party stands behind them.