What’s most concerning about China’s apparent slowdown isn’t simply that its economic growth is stalling. According to analysts, the current downturn suggests China’s former glory days were never really sustainable to begin with.

In fact, some economists and experts had been sounding alarm bells for well over a decade.

This includes Yu Yongding, a former member of the People’s Bank of China’s monetary policy committee, who in a 2010 opinion piece for China Daily suggested that the country’s rapid growth had been achieved at “an extremely high cost.”

“[China’s] growth pattern has now almost exhausted its potential. So China has reached a crucial juncture: without painful structural adjustments the momentum of its economic growth could suddenly be lost,” Yu wrote.

It'll be interesting to see how China's economy adapts here - if this really is the emergence of a pattern of collapse due to growth never having really been sustainable, I'm not sure what could really be done.