Besides being an export driven model, China is probably more investment driven.
That makes sense, as saving rates are high, investment has to be so. Manufacturers, for instance, can use their big savings to build larger factories. Real estate developers invest heavily to build huge residential developments.
Government is also the cause of huge investment, particularly in the time of crisis. Breaking down the GDP growth, the biggest part that the government can really control is investment. As a result of the previous financial crisis, the government invested heavily on infrastructure, like the high speed rail. Huge corruption aside, these projects are most probably not profit-making, but because of the growth target set by the government, they have to build simply because that's the most certain way to boost GDP.
But the debt associated with investments is also high. The Ministry of Railway associated enterprises have some 1.8 trillion RMB of debt of their balance sheets. Because the high speed rail is likely to be a massive miscalculation of demand, there is almost no hope to make money with it, so it is extremely unclear how they can pay back.
That's the danger of such debt driven investment model.
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