China’s curious case of the vanishing economic data
Now you see it, now you don’t as Beijing makes it impossible to decipher fact from fiction
China has been plagued by dodgy data, masking the true state of the world’s second-largest economy. Now, the curse of disappearing data has made it nearly impossible to decipher fact from fiction.
On Monday, the National Bureau of Statistics released a slew of numbers, covering factory activity, retail sales and the depressed property sector. They came a week after the opening round of tariff talks in Geneva between Beijing and Washington and the 90-day truce.
But against this backdrop of the global trade war lingers a dark secret. “Not long ago, anyone could comb through a wide range of official data from China. Then it started to disappear,” The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month.
“Land sales measures, foreign investment data and unemployment indicators have gone dark in recent years. Data on cremations and a business confidence index have been cut off. Even official soy sauce production reports are gone,” the WSJ pointed out.
“In all, Chinese officials have stopped publishing hundreds of data points once used by researchers and investors,” the global media group highlighted in an analysis entitled, “How bad is China’s economy? The data needed to answer is vanishing.”
Beijing ‘faces a backlash from angry factory workers.’
Back to those official figures:
- Industrial output jumped 6.1% in April compared to the same period last year. But that was down from March’s 7.7% rise amid front-loading exports to the United States.
- Consumer spending was also down even though retail sales increased by 5.1% in April year-on-year. Still it was below March’s numbers.
- Shrinking investment and stagnating prices continued to scuttle a renaissance in the property sector. New home prices edged lower again in April.
Delve deeper: Stretching credibility, China’s unemployment rate in April fell to 5.1% from 5.2%, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. Independent evidence has painted a vastly different picture of turmoil and repression.
Between the lines: China Factor reported earlier this month that Beijing “faces a backlash from angry factory workers.” Plunging export orders have triggered a spate of “bankruptcies” in the manufacturing sector as companies close, fueling large-scale layoffs.
Big picture: Up to “20 million workers,” or roughly 3% of China’s labor force, risk being swept away if the tariff truce breaks out into a tariff war again.
China Factor comment: Not that you would know any of this from the official Communist Party narrative as the data that “usually goes missing involves areas of high sensitivity.”