China's economy: hard landing or welcome rebalancing?

Beijing has made clear that after initially cushioning the slowdown with a massive fiscal stimulus, it is now aiming to engineer a shift to a more sustainable growth model

The worse-than-expected trade data from China on Monday was the latest evidence of the struggle Beijing faces in achieving a soft landing for the world's second-largest economy.

Before the Great Crash of 2008, China's role as the world's manufacturing powerhouse, shipping cut-price goods from shoes to smartphones out across the world, seemed like the economic equivalent of alchemy: turning the sweat and toil of hundreds of millions of workers into gold.