China dumps data and clamps down on workers’ rights
Control is everything, and it rests in the hands of the gray men in the Politburo’s Central Committee
Censorship permeates every aspect of life in China. Enforced by the highly secretive Communist Party, its authoritarian leader Xi Jinping wields nearly absolute power.
His desk-bound army in the Central Propaganda Department writes the narrative of his policies based on “manifest destiny” and “civil-military fusion.” Nowhere is this more apparent than in the media and the data used for China’s macroeconomics.
Control is everything, and it rests in the hands of the gray men in the Central Committee of the Politburo, with Xi holding the strings as chief puppet master.
Negative economic numbers are either erased or massaged, while independent agencies are closed or censored. Last week, the China Labor Bulletin, an independent advocacy group for workers’ rights, was forced to shut down.
In a statement, the CLB conceded that “the company” could “no longer maintain operations” and had “decided to dissolve and initiate the relevant procedures.” Regular readers will have seen the China Labor Bulletin when when it warned:
The reality for many Chinese workers, particularly those in manufacturing, remains deeply troubling … with basic wages often [falling] below subsistence levels, compelling workers to endure excessive overtime.
“This situation is exacerbated as plummeting orders push factories towards bankruptcy, leaving workers unpaid and stripped of social security protections,” CLB stated.
Chinese officials have stopped publishing hundreds of data points.
The Wall Street Journal
Bulletin on the Bulletin:
- CLB was launched by Han Dongfang, a former railway worker who took part in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
- Based in Hong Kong, it appears to be another victim of the city’s eroding civil liberties as “One Country, Two Systems” becomes “One Country, One System.”
Delve deeper: As the doors closed, China released a raft of dubious data. The National Bureau of Statistics reported that retail sales in May jumped 6.4% from a year earlier, boosted by government subsidies to consumers and massive price-cutting.
Between the lines: Manufacturing output also increased 5.8% from a year earlier. But it was down from April’s 6.1% and March’s 7.7%. Exports, hit by the Trump administration’s trade war, rose just 4.8% in May from a year earlier.
Big picture: But against this backdrop 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 last month.
Bottom line: “Land sales measures, foreign investment data, and unemployment indicators have gone dark. Data on cremations and a business confidence index have been cut off. In all, Chinese officials have stopped publishing hundreds of data points,” the WSJ said.
China Factor comment: Suppression has always been favored by the Party comrades. You cannot have independent facts and figures interfering with “manifest destiny.”