Editor's note: Matteo Giovannini, a special commentator on current affairs for CGTN, is a finance professional at the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, a non-resident associate fellow at the Center for China and Globalization and a member of the Global Young Leaders Dialogue. The article reflects the author's views and not necessarily those of CGTN.

Some Western media have once again hyped up a narrative that the next global economic crisis could be made in China. They argue that China's growing industrial capacity and widening trade surplus are overwhelming global markets, threatening manufacturers in both developed and developing economies and pushing the world toward a potentially destabilizing breaking point.

It is an argument that deserves serious consideration. China's economy faces genuine challenges, including weak domestic demand, demographic pressures and concerns over property-related debt. Yet it is a significant leap to conclude that China's economic development model has become a threat to the global economy.

The key question is not whether China has economic imbalances. Every major economy does. It is whether China is primarily exporting instability or continuing to provide the world with growth, investment, goods and increasingly sophisticated technologies. On that question, the record is considerably more complex than the "next crisis made in China" narrative suggests.

China's contribution to the global economy is often reduced to its trade surplus. But trade statistics tell only part of the story. China is not simply the world's factory seeking to unload products abroad. It is also one of the world's largest consumer markets and importers. From commodities and energy to luxury goods, machinery and advanced technologies, Chinese demand creates opportunities for producers across Asia, Europe, Africa and Latin America.

This matters particularly as the global economy confronts growing fragmentation. For many developing countries, access to the Chinese market has become an important source of export growth. China's efforts to facilitate imports reflect an economic reality that critics often overlook. The country is too large and too deeply integrated into global supply chains to be understood merely as an exporter.

The same is true of China's industrial capacity. The term overcapacity has become a convenient shorthand for describing China's manufacturing expansion. Yet capacity itself is not inherently a problem. The world faces enormous needs in renewable energy, electric transportation, infrastructure and affordable manufactured goods. The rapid expansion of Chinese production in solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles has helped drive down the cost of technologies essential to the global energy transition.

From the perspective of an emerging economy seeking affordable clean energy, abundant Chinese supply can look less like a threat than an opportunity. Restricting access to lower-cost technologies may ultimately slow the energy transition precisely when the world needs to accelerate it.

The real challenge, therefore, is not how to restrict Chinese production. It is how to ensure that global demand, investment and industrial development expand alongside technological progress. Responding to greater productive capacity primarily through tariffs and protectionism risks creating the very fragmentation that many critics claim to fear. A world in which every major economy attempts to shield itself from competition will become less efficient, more expensive and more politically divided.

China's economic role must also be understood in the context of its engagement with the rest of the developing world. Through the Belt and Road Initiative, China has become a major source of infrastructure financing and development partnerships across Asia, Africa and Latin America. Ports, railways, energy facilities and digital infrastructure have helped many countries address gaps that traditional development finance has often struggled to fill.

China's continued opening up is equally important. At a time when protectionist pressures are rising elsewhere, Beijing has continued to expand market access, develop free trade zones and deepen economic ties with emerging markets. These policies reflect a basic reality that China's future prosperity depends on a global economy that remains open.

This is why the image of China as a reckless economic disruptor is wrong. China has a strong interest in global stability. As one of the world's largest trading nations, it benefits from functioning supply chains, open markets and predictable economic relations. A major global crisis would not leave China unscathed. Its deep integration with the rest of the world gives Beijing a powerful incentive to act as a stabilizing force.

China's rise has undoubtedly changed the global economy. But change is not the same as crisis. For decades, China's growth has expanded trade, reduced costs, created markets and contributed to global development. As the world enters a period of slower growth and deeper geopolitical fragmentation, the answer is not to portray China's economy as the next global threat. The greater danger would be allowing suspicion and protectionism to turn economic interdependence into confrontation.

The global economy needs adjustment, but it also needs growth. China will remain indispensable to both. China is not the world economy's problem. The real problem is whether the world's major economies can still find a way to prosper together.

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