China's government is short of money as its leaders face Trump

BEIJING -- Buried in China's latest government budget were some numbers that add up to an alarming trend. Tax revenue is dropping.

The decline means that China's national government has less money to address the country's serious economic challenges, including a housing market crash and the near bankruptcy of hundreds of local governments.

Weak tax revenue also puts China's leaders in a box as they square off with President Donald Trump, who has imposed 20 per cent tariffs on goods from China and threatened more to come. Beijing has less spare cash to help the export industries that are driving economic growth but could be hurt by tariffs.

The drop in tax collections leaves China's leaders in an unfamiliar position. Until the past several years, China enjoyed robust revenue, which it used to invest in infrastructure, a rapid military buildup and extensive industrial subsidies. Even as economic growth has slowed gradually over the past 12 years, taking a dent out of consumer spending, tax revenue held fairly steady until recently.

Tax revenue fell further last year than ever before. And the only two previous declines in recent decades were under special circumstances: In 2020, China imposed an essentially nationwide pandemic lockdown for a couple of months, and in 2022, Shanghai endured a two-month lockdown.

China's declining tax revenue now has several causes. A big one is deflation -- a broad decline in prices. Companies and now the Chinese government find themselves with less money to make monthly payments on their debts.

Since September, Chinese officials have promised several times that they were on the cusp of doing what practically every foreign and Chinese economist recommends: spending more money to help the country's beleaguered consumers with such measures as higher pensions, better medical benefits, more unemployment insurance or restaurant vouchers. But again and again, including Sunday, they have laid out ambitious programs without providing more than a smidgen of extra spending.

The usual explanation for the frugality lies in long-standing opposition from Xi Jinping, China's top leader, who warned in a speech in 2021 that China "must not aim too high or go overboard with social security, and steer clear of the idleness-breeding trap of welfarism."

But China's 2025 budget, which the Ministry of Finance released March 5, suggests a different explanation: The national government may not have the money. Despite record borrowing, it would be hard-pressed to find the money needed to stimulate consumption.

Overall tax revenue fell 3.4 per cent last year. That might not look like a lot. But it is a sizable divergence from the overall economy, which according to official statistics grew 5 per cent before being adjusted for deflation.

Falling tax revenue means that China's budget deficits are widening not because of extra government spending to help the economy, but because there is less money coming into the till. The problem has been worsening for years at local governments, which have plummeting revenues from selling state land, and has spread to the national government.

Fitch Ratings calculates that overall revenue for the national and local governments -- including taxes and land sales -- totaled 29 per cent of the economy's output as recently as 2018. But this year's budget indicates that overall revenue will be just 21.1 per cent of the economy in 2025.

Roughly half of the decline comes from plummeting revenue from land sales, a well-documented problem related to the housing-market crash, but the rest comes from weakness in tax revenue, a new problem.

That adds up to a huge sum of money. If overall revenue had kept up with the economy over the past seven years, the Chinese government would have another $1.5 trillion to spend in 2025.

China announced this month that it would allow its official target for the budget deficit to increase to 4% this year, after trying to keep it near 3 per cent ever since the global financial crisis in 2009. But analysts say the true deficit is already much larger, because China is quietly counting a lot of long-term borrowing as though it were tax revenue.

Comparing spending only with actual revenue, without the borrowing, the Finance Ministry's budget shows a deficit equal to almost 9 per cent of the economy. In 2018, it was only 3.2 per cent.

"Deficits are quite high and debt is rising quite quickly, so they are fiscally challenged," said Jeremy Zook, a director of Asia and Pacific sovereign ratings at Fitch.

The biggest taxes in China are value-added taxes, a kind of sales tax that the government collects on practically every transaction, from rent to refrigerators. Last year, revenue from value-added taxes fell short of expectations by 7.9 per cent.

The word "deflation" is prohibited in official Chinese documents, so the ministry came up with a euphemistic explanation: "This decrease was mainly due to the fact that the producer prices were lower than expected."

Producer prices, essentially wholesale prices calculated as goods leave factories and farms, fell 2.3 per cent in China last year.

Revenue from value-added taxes began weakening in 2018. That was when the government cut these taxes sharply for exporters to help them offset the impact of tariffs imposed by Trump in his first term.

The cost of that tax break has soared since then as China's exports have surged, producing a trade surplus of almost $1 trillion last year even as the rest of the economy stagnated.

Another problem lies in falling salaries and rising layoffs, especially during the second half of last year. Income taxes collected from individuals were 7.5% below expectations last year, the Finance Ministry said in its budget.

China's own steep tariffs on imports are another large source of revenue. But having lost much of their savings in the housing market crash, China's consumers have cut back on purchases of imports like handbags and perfume, while prices have fallen for many imported goods. So revenue from customs duties was 9.2 per cent below forecasts last year, the Finance Ministry said.

This year's financial picture could be even worse than the budget anticipates. The Finance Ministry's budget repeated many of the same optimistic assumptions about tax revenue and overall economic performance that it made last year.

Governments in the West derive considerable revenue from taxes on investment gains, inheritances and real estate. But China has no taxes on investment gains or inheritances and almost none on real estate.

The general lack of real estate taxes lies at the root of a separate problem: China's local governments are also running out of money. Until recently, they derived up to 80% of their revenues from selling land to property developers.

But those sales have plummeted since the housing crash began in 2021, which has gutted demand for new apartments and bankrupted many developers.

Local governments are responsible for most pensions, medical benefits and other social spending in China. The national government has been selling extra bonds to raise money for bailing out the weakest local governments, many of which are behind on their debts. The national government has called for local governments to step up social spending but, short on cash itself, has offered scant new financial assistance.

And new taxes are not likely forthcoming, according to Jia Kang, a retired research director at the Finance Ministry and still one of China's most influential voices on tax policy. He said in an interview that public opposition to inheritance taxes is strong, while taxes on investment gains or real estate would hurt stocks or the housing market.

One factor not causing China's tax challenges is fraud or tax evasion, Jia said. The procedures for checking on payments have become very detailed, he said. "It is difficult to cheat in this system."