Beijing Stops Publishing "Hundreds Of Statistics" To Cover Up Economic Collapse
Two weeks ago, when we first reported that as a result of the ongoing Trump trade war with China, 'chinese factories are shutting down, laying off workers', we said that as a result of this war of attrition in which the outcome of every incremental clash and battle will be used just as aggressively for media propaganda, 'the fact that any marginal pain will be amplified as trade war weakness will mean that Beijing will do everything in its power to prevent the full extent of the shutdowns from being revealed.'
Sure enough, fast forward to today when the WSJ reports that whereas 'not long ago, anyone could comb through a wide range of official data from China… then it started to disappear. '
Regular China-watchers know very well that when it comes to local 'data' reporting, China's fabrication and goalseeking skills are second to none, and even the US Bureau of Labor Statistics is a rank amateur compared to Beijing's National Bureau of Statistics, which tramples over actual econometric reporting with the glee of a bull in a, well, China shop. It's why nobody actually believes any of the propaganda released by Beijing, and instead independent, private (and very expensive) third-party services for data collection and analysis are used to measure accurately the current state of China's economy.
So imagine how bad it must be when instead of simply making stuff up, China decides that the easier approach is simply to no longer report the fake data. The best example is surely the data on Chinese youth unemployment which hit a record 22% in the summer of 2023… at which China decided to simply stop reporting it altogether.
In the US, bad data is just "seasonally" massaged and birth/deathed until it is +300,000. In China, they just stop reporting it.*CHINA TO STOP PUBLISH DATA FOR YOUTH JOBLESS RATE pic.twitter.com/uNdAYho9wo — zerohedge (@zerohedge) August 15, 2023
Curiously, China halted reports on its youth unemployment just weeks after we quoted Goldman China strategist Maggie Wei (full note available to professional subs), who said that 'Chinese youth unemployment rates tend to be higher than overall unemployment rates as this group appear particularly vulnerable to economic downcycles, likely due to a lack of experience.' In other words, when it comes to early indicators of economic collapse, this is it…. And more importantly, such an indicator would also telegraph to China's millions of unemployed young men and women that there are millions more like them, and that all they have to do to fix their plight, is to demand change in Beijing and stage a youth insurrection. Which, of course, is the single biggest nightmare for China's communist party.
But it's not just youth unemployment: according to the WSJ, land sales measures, foreign investment data and countless other unemployment indicators have gone dark in recent years, while data on cremations and a business confidence index have been cut off. Even official soy sauce production reports are gone.
In all, 'Chinese officials have stopped publishing hundreds of data points once used by researchers and investors', according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.
In most cases, Chinese authorities haven't given any reason for ending or withholding data. But the missing numbers have come as the world's second biggest economy has 'stumbled under the weight of excessive debt, a crumbling real-estate market and other troubles, spurring heavy-handed efforts by authorities to control the narrative.'
Or, precisely what we said when we warned in April that ' Beijing will do everything in its power to prevent the full extent of the shutdowns from being revealed.'
China's National Bureau of Statistics stopped publishing some numbers related to unemployment in urban areas in recent years. After an anonymous user on the bureau's website asked why one of those data points had disappeared, the bureau said only that the ministry that provided it stopped sharing the data.
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