EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY, CHAIRMAN XI: Is China’s Data Manipulated, or Flawed? Maybe Both: Suspension of the youth unemployment rate fits the autocrat’s playbook of burying unflattering statistics.
The unemployment rate for China’s youth reached an all time record of 21.3% in June. China’s National Bureau of Statistics responded by ceasing publication of the rate.
The move calls attention to the lengths to which Beijing will go to suppress unflattering information, in this case the economic distress facing China’s young people.
Yet burying the data doesn’t fix the problem; it doesn’t even hide it. Rather, it reveals something endemic to autocratic societies: an inability, or unwillingness, to produce genuinely accurate and unbiased statistics.
Tuesday’s decision to suspend reporting the unemployment rate for people ages 16 to 24, which the government attributed to issues over how to treat students looking for work, is part of a pattern: Beijing drops a data series, often quietly, citing poor data quality, then waits until everyone forgets.
“The National Bureau of Statistics has a history of discontinuing important data series,” Carsten Holz, a professor at Hong Kong University of Science & Technology, said via email. “The NBS mission is not to serve the public, but the Chinese Communist Party. Any order from the Party to obfuscate the derivation of the official GDP [gross domestic product] statistics or to discontinue unfavorable unemployment statistics would take precedence over professional statistics practices.”
Good thing that could never happen here.
Signs of financial stress at a large asset manager in China are making investors nervous about contagion from the country’s slumping property sector, rekindling a debate over whether a “Lehman moment” could occur in the world’s second-largest economy.
Zhongrong International Trust, a seller of esoteric financial products that had the equivalent of $108 billion in assets under management at the end of 2022, has become the market’s latest worry. Four trust products managed by the firm recently missed interest and principal payments totaling the equivalent of $14 million to three publicly listed Chinese companies, according to stock-exchange filings. Beijing-headquartered Zhongrong has provided financing to many real-estate developers and helped to fund their building projects.
Zhongrong is part of a larger, sprawling financial conglomerate called Zhongzhi Enterprise Group that owns several wealth-management businesses. If their repayment problems and defaults snowball, it could imperil many more investment products that were sold to numerous companies and wealthy individuals in China.
On social media, some individual investors said they didn’t receive promised payments from Zhongrong products and some from Zhongzhi’s other units, and have complained to local authorities. Neither company has responded publicly to the allegations, and they didn’t reply to requests for comment.
You know, China was booming, then Xi injected communism back into it, and now it’s dying. It’s like that stuff is poison or something.