China's Uncertain Economic Future

TAIPEI (TheStreet) -- The International Monetary Fund is estimating China grew 7.8% last year, within range of predictions that it would cool from more than an annual 9% over the past decade. The fever has passed.

Unless it hasn't.

Although the IMF also predicts 8.2% growth for China in 2013, the longer-term trend points toward quite a bit less. That's not just fallout from a turbulent global economy, though dulled export demand would have a lot to do with the 2012 figure.

It's because newly appointed central leaders want to rebalance the world's second-largest economy, to make it sustainable for China itself, by easing it away from growth steroids such as investment and commodity-intensive industry.

Services and retail would wean China off these substances, which would meanwhile be throttled by stronger rules on getting capital and running an honest business.

Drops of this new formula have already started to show. Domestic consumption, a core policy mission enshrined in the 2011-2015 Five-Year Plan, jumped from 37.3% to 51.6% of the GDP in 2011, a strong omen for services and retail.

If the medicine really takes hold in the longer term, it would push China's annual economic growth into the 5%-6% range, predicts George Magnus, senior economic adviser with UBS Investment Bank in London.

The Rx would get China over a BRIC wall, away from a looming middle-income trap and on the way to a more modern nation, he argues.

The shift would fuel business for the foreign fast-food chains such as the ever-popular McDonald's (MCD) and Yoshinoya's (9891.T) Japanese noodle bowls and maybe someday, when the rules are more relaxed, for financial services such as those offered by Goldman Sachs (GS), known for its ability to make private equity deals in China despite a not-so-level playing field.

Without a rebalancing -- also in the Five-Year Plan -- the old economic growth prescription will lead to overcapacity, poorer investment returns and more unpaid bank loans, Magnus says. Existing business rules and low interest rates will also make it too easy for developers or factories to grab money that should otherwise be injected into the country's under-medicated health-care system for the masses.

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