News Analysis As China prepares for the muted Lunar New Year celebrations due to Omicron, it faces its largest challenges to economic growth. With 2022 the Communist Party version of an election year—a time when growth is typically boosted and credit loosened—China faces some of the deepest challenges to growth it has faced in some time. With 2021 growth forecast to come in around 5 percent, serious questions exist over how China will reach that level of growth in such a challenging environment. Despite the public talk of shifting China to a consumer-based economy, shoppers seem less willing to comply. Burdened with rapidly rising household debt level that now surpasses the United States and most other developed countries relative to income, consumers simply do not have the ability to increase spending that Beijing would like them to have. After accounting for the base effect from the pandemic-induced drop in retail …