According to the Wall Street Journal, the Chinese government has been manipulating and hiding economic data to hide the real situation in the country.
GDP, unemployment, real estate, even soy sauce and cremations: everything has become sensitive data.
Starting with the GDP, which is never wrong
The Chinese government has set a target of 5% growth in 2024 — exactly the target number.
But…
• Goldman Sachs estimated only +3.7%
• Rhodium Group went further: +2.4%
Both used parallel data to arrive at the final result — consumption, energy and imports. Doubt about the official numbers became the rule.
Youth unemployment: the bill that disappeared (and came back with a make-up on it)
In 2023, the rate reached 21.3%. After that, the data disappeared for 5 months.
When it reappeared, it was only 14.5% — but with a trick: 62 million students were excluded from the calculation, even those who were looking for work.
An economist at Peking University estimates the real number is higher than 46%.
Shoyu as a thermometer? Yes. And it was stopped.
Soy sauce production, an indirect indicator of domestic consumption, has no longer been reported since May 2021.
It's a sign of the extent of concern about any metric that points to a slowdown.
Cremations: the demographic that died
During the pandemic, the number of cremations served as a thermometer of mortality.
But in 2022, this data also disappeared from public reports.
Not even the dead escape statistical control.
Real estate: silence since the developer crisis
Residential property sales stopped being reported in 2022, right in the midst of the collapse of giants like Evergrande and Country Garden.
Without data, the market only sees smoke.
Foreign investors: total opacity
Since April 2024, China's major exchanges will no longer show real-time foreign capital flows.
The global investor began to operate in the dark.
Censored economists
Economist Gao Shanwen of SDIC Securities told a conference in the US that China could be growing at just 2% a year.
A month later, he was banned from giving interviews or making public statements.
He was not arrested, but he disappeared from the radar.
Wall Street set up its own “parallel IBGE”
Faced with a lack of trust, banks like Goldman Sachs have created alternative models based on:
• Vessel traffic
• Imports
• Energy consumption
• Corporate reports
They prefer to cross-reference data rather than trust the officials.
Moral of the story:
China tries to maintain the appearance of stability.
But today, foreign investors believe more in the soy sauce consumption curve than in reports from Beijing.
And that says it all.