Chinese economists pessimistic about Europe's prospects

Increasing pessimism is emerging from Chinese economists and in the business press about Europe's prospects, following a European Union bailout for Spanish banks and ahead of a general election in Greece that could determine whether the country will stay in the eurozone.

Economist Han Zhiguo posted on his micro blog that the EU has already "spiritually disbanded".

Top-down rescue plans are meaningless and will not achieve their goals, he wrote, and if the crisis is allowed to linger, the future can only be the EU's formal collapse.

Even if the EU does not want to proclaim a formal collapse, said an editorial in the Securities Market Weekly, all it can do is more of the same: more haggling among member states, more halfhearted austerity programs, more rescues and more crises.

The crisis in the eurozone, as an editor's note in Chinese Business News said on Wednesday, is no longer merely a crisis of sovereign debt in some EU member states.

Beginning with the banking rescue in Spain, it is on a path to become a Europe-wide banking crisis that will seriously affect the global banking industry, the newspaper said.

An editorial in Tianjinwe.com, a news portal in Tianjin, a northern port city, said the method being used in Spain's banking rescue is like "quenching thirst by drinking poison".

Spreading epidemic

Even worse, the editorial said, the problem in Spain will spread to other countries. Even Germany is not an exception, as it likes to claim. Germany's government debt is even larger than Spain's, the editorial said.

So the eurozone debt crisis must be a focal subject of the G20 summit scheduled for next week in Mexico.

How to contain the crisis from spreading is not any single country's affair but a global business, because no country can single-handedly deal with a crisis of such potential harm, the editorial pointed out.

At Sohu.com, business commentator Han Wei sounded alarm that the eurozone debt crisis is no longer an economic problem. It has evolved into a political problem and a "gigantic social issue".