Downgrades. That's the word that pops into my mind when it comes to economic growth in China these days.

The world's second largest economy continues to struggle with a real estate downturn, slowing consumer spending, and

geopolitical tensions.

And that's raising doubts that the country can even meet its official growth target

of around 5% this year.

So a lot of economy watchers have recently

downgraded their Chinese growth forecasts. That made me curious about

where our China economist stands in all of this. So today I'm speaking with our

chief China economist in Goldman Sachs research,

Wei Shan, who's joining me remotely from Hong Kong.

Wei, welcome back to the program.

Thanks for having me. So let's get into it.

Wei, we lost that down only May of this year, so only a handful of months ago.

And when I think back to that conversation, the narrative went something like this. Chinese growth was much better than expected heading into 2024.

Chinese equities were taking off.

So it was a very, in some ways, surprising, upbeat conversation relative to our prior

expectations but today it feels like a really different picture.

Investor confidence seems to have waned obviously Obviously, Chinese equities have substantially

underperformed of late.

And we've seen a slew of global banks

downgrading their growth forecasts for the country.

So bring us up to speed on how we got here and how the

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