Pity people didn’t pay more attention.

That was in 2018 as part of an exercise by the Paris-based organization to sketch what the world might look like through 2060. It didn’t create huge waves at the time, perhaps because it was some way off. Or maybe people weren’t ready to hear that China’s impressive numbers wouldn’t last forever. I suspect it was the latter, which might go some way to explaining the pervasive disappointment surrounding the country’s reopening from Covid Zero. The OECD is working on an update and it’s a fair bet that, if the prognosis stands, it will get more air time.

There’s a bull market today for analysis that contemplates a world where China doesn’t sweep everything before it. Citigroup economists warned of  a “confidence trap,” a spiral where bad news feeds upon itself. Recalibrations in thinking about the world’s second-largest economy that should have occurred well before the pandemic are now happening in real time. The proximate driver of that re-assessment is disappointing data. There’s a risk of overshooting and becoming too pessimistic.

An official growth target that looked low when Beijing unveiled it a few months ago now looks like a decent result. If gross domestic product does increase by around 5% this year, up from 3% in 2022, it will be driven largely by what is going on inside China. That means consumers. Exports and factories are turning in a subpar performance. And it’s affecting Asia, the region that had high hopes of being lifted by the dismantling of pandemic shackles. 

South Korea is being pulled into a slowdown and languishing exports are a large reason. Shipments to China are falling; sales dropped 26.5% in April from a year earlier, far steeper than the decline in cargo destined for the US, while Europe showed a gain of about 10%. Technology exports are a big part of this. Industrial production in Japan unexpectedly slipped, according to figures released Wednesday. Singapore’s GDP contracted in the first quarter and the government predicts a tough year for exports.

Singapore is pinning hopes for avoiding a recession on a rebound in travel. That sounds a lot like a bet on tourism from China, but even there gains haven’t been spectacular. Not benefiting Asia much is one thing, is China is now hurting the region? Policymakers are loath to call China out by name and like to cloak their commentaries in terms like “slowing in global demand.” 

The OECD paper’s authors, Yvan Guillemette and David Turner, predicted an ascendant China that would replace the US as the No. 1 economy around 2030. There would also be a demographic reckoning, a legacy of the one-child policy, which would stall China’s march. India would become a superpower and Indonesia would, finally, live up to its perennial promise. What really appealed to me about their work, aside from the idea that China would post rates of growth more like those of North America and the euro zone, was that it offered a peek into what might happen after China catches the US. There were many studies at the time canvassing American eclipse, but few bothered to speculate what might happen next. (The OCED declined to make someone available for an interview, preferring to wait until the update is published.)

In May of 2018, a few months before the paper was released, Capital Economics flagged China’s long-run potential — for disappointment. The firm contrasted its view that China’s growth would slip to around 2% by 2030 with major forecasters who still seemed wedded to China’s outperformance. Revisiting the projection recently, Chief Asia Economist Mark Williams said in a note he’s comfortable with how things are unfolding:

Although this still puts us below most forecasters’ expectations (though less so than five years ago), we don’t believe this is a particularly downbeat forecast. It implies that per capita incomes in China will continue to converge with developed economy incomes. (China’s aggregate GDP might not because of the drag of a contracting population.) Our 2% forecast would place China in the middle of the ranks of middle-income EMs: no longer an outperformer, but not an underperformer either.

In other words, there’s a sunset clause on China’s exceptionalism. Fair enough; the bigger you get, the harder it is to keep posting numbers so much better than your peers. It also means that China’s economic cycles will get more scrutiny. I’m waiting for the “jobless recovery” label, an epithet that the US expansion from 2009-2020 wore in its infancy, to be applied to China. Such is life in the 2% world.

More From Bloomberg Opinion:

• China’s Low Inflation Is No Cause for Applause: Daniel Moss

• $10 Billion China Property Bond Defaults Are Looming: Shuli Ren

• Reaching Out to China Is Actually a Good Thing: Editorial

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Daniel Moss is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Asian economies. Previously, he was executive editor of Bloomberg News for economics.

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