Beijing has stopped publishing hundreds of statistics, making it harder to know what’s going on in the country
By Rebecca Feng and Jason Douglas of The WSJ. Excerpts:
"Official figures put GDP growth at 5% last year and 5.2% in 2023, but some have estimated that Beijing overstated its numbers by as much as 2 to 3 percentage points.
To get what they consider to be more realistic assessments of China’s growth, economists have turned to alternative sources such as movie box office revenues, satellite data on the intensity of nighttime lights, the operating rates of cement factories and electricity generation by major power companies. Some parse location data from mapping services run by private companies such as Chinese tech giant Baidu to gauge business activity.
One economist said he has been assessing the health of China’s services sector by counting news stories about owners of gyms and beauty salons who abruptly close up and skip town with users’ membership fees."
"Former Chinese premier Li Keqiang famously told the U.S. ambassador in 2007 that GDP data for a Chinese province he governed at the time were “man-made” and therefore unreliable, according to a leaked U.S. diplomatic cable."
"China’s official GDP growth of 5% in 2024 exactly matched the target the government had set the previous year."
"In December, a prominent Chinese economist at state-owned SDIC Securities, Gao Shanwen, said at a conference in Washington that China’s economic growth “might be around 2%” the past few years, adding, “we do not know the true number of China’s real growth figure.”
China’s leader Xi Jinping ordered that Gao be disciplined and he has been banned from speaking publicly for an unspecified period."
"In February, Goldman Sachs came up with an alternative way of measuring China’s economic growth by crunching figures such as import data, which can be read as proxies for domestic spending. The thinking was that trade data get published frequently and is hard to fudge, since China’s trading partners also report those numbers.
That approach implied that China’s growth in 2024 averaged 3.7%. Using a different method, Rhodium Group, a New York-based research outfit, said growth was closer to 2.4% in 2024."
"Often, the data that goes missing involves areas of high sensitivity or headaches for Beijing, such as the property market"
"a Chinese think tank called Beike Research Institute released a report in 2022 that found the average housing vacancy rate among 28 Chinese cities was higher than the average in the U.S. and other places"
"A few days later, Beike retracted the report and apologized"
"In the mid-2000s, an economist named Yi Fuxian questioned the accuracy of China’s population data and argued that tuberculosis vaccinations were a better measure of population growth because every newborn in China is required to be vaccinated.
In 2020, 5.4 million such vaccines were administered, according to data compiled by the private Chinese think tank Forward Business and Intelligence. Chinese authorities said the country recorded 12.1 million births that year.
A year later, the National Institutes for Food and Drug Control discontinued the weekly data release of tuberculosis vaccines administered, along with other vaccine data."
Related post:
