The Growing Problem With China's Unreliable Numbers (ft.com)
- Reference: 0180142631
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/11/19/1635239/the-growing-problem-with-chinas-unreliable-numbers
- Source link: https://www.ft.com/content/5b9e7440-51d9-44fa-972c-5f00faf91e62
The IMF in 2024 gave China a C grade for national accounts. The rating puts China on par with India and below Vietnam. Fixed asset investment data showed negative growth in 2025 for only the second time in decades. Property investment has fallen consistently since 2022. But official GDP investment data shows no signs of declining.
The National Bureau of Statistics stopped publishing sectoral breakdowns of fixed asset investment in 2018. It discontinued a price series in 2021 and a land sales series in 2023. Beijing has restricted researcher access rather than addressing longstanding questions about data quality. China says it disagrees with the IMF's C rating. The government argued its production-side GDP approach is appropriate.
Why does it matter? China is too large and too interconnected with the global economy for unreliable data to be a purely domestic issue. The lack of transparency creates problems for everyone trying to make decisions based on understanding China's economic trajectory. As Eswar Prasad, a professor at Cornell University and former IMF official, told FT: China is one of the two biggest economies in the world. "It would be nice to know what is really going on."
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/5b9e7440-51d9-44fa-972c-5f00faf91e62
This guy expects Chinas collapse ... (Score:5, Informative)
... within this decade. [1]And he's been doing that for a while [youtube.com]. And his reasoning sounds plausible.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqA5NODRnQI
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I watch a lot of PZ, but you need to take that guy with a grain of salt. Yes, he's generally correct about the overall trends, and he got famous by predicting the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but he's also prone to wild exaggerations, and often spouts incorrect details about countries or industries he talks about.
In the case of China, PZ's biggest argument that they're past peak and falling is demographic data. Unfortunately, just like their financial numbers, their demographic numbers are unreliable too.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Cripes, anyone who had been paying attention for the last quarter of a century could have predicted the "invasion of Ukraine". How many "red lines" did NATO think it could cross before Russia finally felt forced to act?
Re: (Score:2)
Or, how many red lines would NATO allow Russia to cross before Russia realized it could just do what it wanted? I think it is unlikely that Putin actually believed any of the ridiculous talk about the Ukraine joining NATO. That was never actually on the table. It was not eligible before Russia invaded, and it certainly isn't now.
I wouldn't be surprised if Putin took that obviously empty talk from Biden (who was talking about it during Obama's administration) as an indication that NATO didn't have a re
I know you have to take Peter Zeihan ... (Score:2)
... with a metric ton of salt, but on the demographics of China and their impact he seems spot on. And let's be honest, there's not that much you can get wrong here. It's quite simple math.
Re: (Score:1)
LOL Zeihan.. youtube specialist.
Re:This guy expects Chinas collapse ... (Score:5, Informative)
> ... within this decade. [1]And he's been doing that for a while [youtube.com]. And his reasoning sounds plausible.
Before I even clicked on the link I was pretty sure it was going to be a Peter Zeihan video, and I was not wrong. A friend of mine once wrote "Peter Zeihan has predicted 20 of the last 3 international crises", and that's a pretty accurate summation of his videos. He's smart and knowledgeable, and therefore convincing; but there are things he misses, including "the mark" on a lot of occasions, and he skews pretty heavily toward alarmism.
Whenever I encounter a persuasive pundit on YouTube I look for contrary opinions and info. I doubly recommend that practice in Zeihan's case. His vids can be part of a balanced news meal, but skipping counter opinions will likely result in a "newstritive" deficiency.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqA5NODRnQI
Re: This guy expects Chinas collapse ... (Score:2, Insightful)
You don't listen to people like Zeihan to know the future, you listen so you're not surprised when it arrives. It's not meant to be 100% accurate. It's meant to highlight the dynamics of the global economy.
Re: (Score:1)
That's been the plan since the early 2000's, and while I hope it works, I'm not as certain about it as I once was.
Though the big concern has got to be what the CCP may do as it desperately tries to cling to power. When Argentina began to fall apart, they invaded the Falklands. China already wants to invade Taiwan. Argentina didn't have nukes.
China Shills Assemble (Score:3)
It's your time to defend China's reputation!
Re: (Score:1)
> It's your time to defend China's reputation!
It isn't even desirable - never mind necessary - to worry about China's reputation when we have "unreliable numbers" [1]much closer to home. [economist.com]
[1] https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker/economy
Re: China Shills Assemble (Score:2)
But because we have reliable number for a long period of time before that, we're still able to effectively use proxy measures from private industry to have a good sense of where we're at. With China, the numbers have been off for so long that analyses are inevitably harder to make with precision.
Re: (Score:2)
Which is on its way to the President's desk, and he said he'll sign it. Passed with a veto-proof majority in the House.
Not a China problem (Score:2)
No one believes the US inflation report, or the job report that's been off by almost 1 million jobs [1]https://www.npr.org/2025/09/09... [npr.org]
[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/09/09/nx-s1-5527000/bls-us-job-growth-numbers-revised
China (Score:2)
The land of facades.
China's numbers have always been fantasy (Score:2)
The same goes for much of the "data" driving their stock mark....er....casino.
Having lived there for years as an expat and seen entire sections of cities with many thousands of newly built flats that were vacant and stayed vacant, I think it's only a matter of time before that house of cards implodes.
The "nong min" don't take kindly to the apparatchiks that have been benefiting from the egregious corruption and self dealing. It's going to be ugly when it implodes.
Re: (Score:2)
"Nong min"?
How can you take the official numbers seriously (Score:3)
unless you've been in a coma for the last 50 years? I mean, seriously, their entire economy has been a house of cards for at least that long.
Wishful thinking (Score:1)
These guys just hope they are true, but they aren't.
Because how else can their production boom be explained? That they suddenly appeared as the bigest car producer in the world, taking over markets?
And it doesn't happen only with cars.
fortunately (Score:1)
.... Their green energy data is flawless, because nobody would ever deliberately lie about that stuff!
Re: fortunately (Score:2)
It would really be a delight for a reporter to have one of those boxes that echoes someoneâ(TM)s words back at them a half second after they say them.
Ask a touchy question and then just hold it up and watch Trump go insane.
Re: (Score:2)
AI and modeling is making robotics useful across a wide range of disciplines, very suddenly. Where before you might need years and scores of prototyping attempts to get a functional restaurant dish washing robot today videos of humans doing the job can be fed to the AI, a prototype designed in the computer, and then thousands of actions and exceptions modeled in a few days before ever cutting a piece of metal.
When people who aren't smart enough to do anything more complex than wash dishes are laid off, whe
Re: (Score:2)
Troll? Really mods? OK, whatever.