tl;dr The immense government-driven spending boom on building infrastructure and real estate since 2008 has made the construction, real estate, and banking sectors disproportionately large compared to the rest of the economy, larger proportionally even compared to the Japanese economy before its real estate bubble crashed. The government is going to have to enact a potentially long period of enforced austerity on these sectors in order to allow other sectors, especially capital-intensive industry like electronics manufacturing, to catch up. But the current geopolitical climate and continuing pandemic conditions might put a damper on their desire to use these new industries in an export drive. Therefore China is likely looking at a significant period of low growth like it did in the late 90s.
China is in a better position than most countries to impose that austerity, correct?
Its austerity in the sense that lines of cheap, government-guaranteed credit for real estate and infrastructure construction are over to avoid continued overproduction shattering the existing bubble. So growth in these sectors are going to crash but it would be much much worse if the Evergrande collapse happened on a national scale, since as the article mentioned a lot of Chinese individual wealth/savings is tied up in real estate.
So yeah theyre better positioned than most to do so because their government actually intervenes to manage the economy, as opposed to most everywhere else who let the market commit suicide and only then maybe try to fix the damage.
This isn't austerity in the sense they're cutting spending and making workers tighten their belts, but the government tightening control of lending which will negatively affect growth.