Funny, I was looking at the second half of that paragraph so will post it here:
Because the banking system is tightly controlled by the party-state – with state-owned or state-connected enterprises serving as the fiefdoms and cash cows of elite families – the state sector enjoyed privileged access to state bank loans, which were used to fuel an investment spree. The result was rising employment, a temporary and localized economic boom, and a windfall for the elite. But this dynamic also left behind redundant and unprofitable construction projects: empty apartments, underused airports, excessive coal plants and steel mills. That, in turn, resulted in falling profits, slowing growth and worsening indebtedness across the main sectors of the economy.
Which looks eerily similar to the influx of outside capital in cities like mine, which are experiencing unprecedented growth as huge apartment complexes are built for millions of dollars, while the average person can't afford a $500,000 home that was just $150,000 a decade ago. Because access to capital has been ..corrupted? I don't know the right word.
So we have all of these people working as hard as they can to build nonproductive infrastructure. A healthier investment might look like NOT paving farms. Or expanding mass transit. Or funding education. Or stimulating the commercial and industrial sectors. Or doing anything else at all really.
We already went down this road in the 2000s, when the Dot Bomb strategically crashed the economy to give Bush the win in the Bush v. Gore decision, so that attention could be distracted away from sustainability investments like electric cars and solar, towards militarism and a buildout of the housing market which led to the housing bubble popping in 2008. IMHO the US never recovered from that, so now it's all these shell games designed to keep capital out of the hands of everyday working people, who will be left behind as we transition to a rent-based economy of global neofeudalism.
Beneficiaries are not the ones paying in with their time and effort, which creates low morale in the economy and causes the 20% unemployment in youth who have rightfully spotted that the economy is rigged. I think this will become more prevalent as authoritarianism rises and AI eventually takes an oversight role while having no accountability.
BTW this is all fixed through tax policy. We simply tax the wealthy at post-WWII levels until the national debt is paid and workers return to a livable wage as the middle class grows. Note that that's the only thing we haven't tried, which is why no progress is being made.