China’s era of spectacular economic growth is coming to an end. That’s a popular theme at the moment, with any number of culprits cited — an overleveraged financial system, pollution, too little consumer spending, corruption, anti-corruption campaigns, and of course bad driving. It’s reached the point that the Chinese government’s International Press Center felt compelled to gather a group of reporters in Beijing earlier this week just so that Justin Yifu Lin, the former World Bank chief economist who is now a professor at Peking University and a government adviser, could tell them that he’s “reasonably confident the Chinese government has the ability to maintain a 7.5% to 8% growth rate.”