Looking for trouble

By S.C. | HONG KONG

HOW do you say "hard landing" in Chinese? 硬着陆 (ying zhuolu)—that's how. Lots of nervous Chinese have started typing those characters into Google, point out Paul Cavey, Tim Powers and Chen Shao of Macquarie (see chart). There were about four times as many searches for the term this month as last. "That the economy is slowing is filtering into the public consciousness," they conclude. Since economic fears are often self-fulfilling, the googlers' nervousness may contribute to the very slowdown they fear.

Of course Google is not the most popular search engine in China. If you type 硬着陆 into Baidu, the market leader, the top result is an entry in Baidu's own collaborative encyclopedia. It defines a hard landing as a strong monetary and fiscal tightening, designed to curb inflation even at some cost to growth. The advantage of such a landing, it explains, is its brevity. Hard landings are a short, sharp shock. Soft landings hurt less but for longer.

Further examples of hard landings provided by Baidu include the Soviet Union's Luna space programme, which smashed an unmanned spacecraft into the moon, once in 1959 and three times during 1965. The first crash was intentional (in 1959, even hitting the moon was a big achievement); the three in 1965 were all failed attempts at soft landings.

Chinese interbank rates have spiked in recent weeks. But no one thinks China's policymakers are deliberately engineering a crash landing--inflation is not nearly bad enough to warrant such a drastic response. So we just have to hope China's leaders don't repeat the mistakes of Luna 5, 7 and 8.