Not what I would call an economic crisis, for my taste, because people can still make a decent living.
"Decent" is a point of view. My sources are largely confined to Beijing and the surrounding province (Hebei), but average incomes have dipped as much as 40% and everybody has had to make painful cutbacks to their standards of living. The government itself is running out of ways to hide that they don't even have any more money they can borrow.
Anyway, if your friends are living comfortably there then they are doing better than my clients. I'll just leave it at that, with the re-iterated disclaimer that my sources are largely limited to Beijing.