It’s true. Don’t trust anything the Chinese government says.
Also, be skeptical of reports that China is in big trouble.
This WSJ article notes that the Chinese government has stopped reporting a wide range of economic data, and that could mean that the tariffs are having an effect.
Not long ago, anyone could comb through a wide range of official data from China. Then it started to disappear.
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.
In all, Chinese officials have stopped publishing hundreds of data points once used by researchers and investors, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.
Data on cremations is gone? Who uses cremation data?
The prospects of authoritarian countries are notoriously difficult to predict.
In 1987, President Reagan made his speech in Berlin, asking General Secretary Gorbachev to tear down the wall separating East and West Berlin. It’s hard to imagine now, but a population of 250 million people, about as many as in the US, lived in a police state. For a current comparison, life in the Soviet Union was not as bad as it is North Korea and not as good as it is in China.
President Reagan was excellent, in a conventional way, at giving speeches. Here is the short version.
The Soviet Union had existed for 65 years, and had been in a non-shooting war with America and the West for 40 years. When Reagan made that speech, most people thought that he was being provocative or doing it for propaganda purposes. Some commentators thought that Reagan’s statement was idiotic. Nobody thought the wall was actually going to come down.
Two years later, the Berlin Wall came down. Two years later, the Soviet Union broke up. Nobody in 1987 saw that coming.
Predictions about China are just like that.
It was expected that when trade with China opened up and their economy developed, they would become more like a liberal democracy. Still waiting on that.
More recently, the prediction was that China would get old, before it got rich. The idea was that their one-child policy would result in demographic shift in China, which would make it no threat to the West.
The WSJ article notes that many economic indicators were going in a direction unfavorable to China, then all reporting was halted. The implication is that China is in a tough spot.
Don’t rely on any predictions about China that suggests that we won.
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