To answer this question, Michael Pettis, professor of finance at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management argues GDP, the statistics supposedly able to measure both on growth and ability to service debt, never perfectly achieved so (building a bridge to nowhere counts the same as building a much-needed bridge). But this is particularly problematic with China given “the huge amount of non-productive activities were counted as growth inside China.” He also points out another fundamental issue with China’s GDP is that most nations measure GDP on output, but China measures it on input. In other words, it’s a number based on forecasting to meet its government’s consensus on growth target, “which engages in the requisite amount of activity, usually funded by debt. (So) as long as China has debt capacity, and as long as it can postpone the writing down of non-productive assets, Beijing can achieve any growth target it desires. ” Read more here