But the Communist Party’s internal information systems may also be flawed
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Zhao jian’s article was online for just a few hours on August 16th before censors erased it. To Western readers the content would have appeared anodyne, but to a Communist Party official it was laced with dangerous ideas. Mr Zhao, a respected economist, argued that it was hard to grasp why China’s government was not making more effort to stimulate the economy. The most serious economic downturn in a generation had caused uncertainty about the future to “coil around the hearts of the people”, he wrote. “The logic and constraints of decision-makers cannot be understood by the market.”
The deletion of the article, ironically enough, proved Mr Zhao’s point. China’s army of internet censors routinely purge posts that run counter to the policies of Xi Jinping, the country’s supreme leader. But the realm of what is considered too sensitive has expanded rapidly in recent years, and now includes much discussion about the economy. Academics and pundits who seek to debate seemingly mundane economic matters are silenced. Data that used to be readily available are disappearing from the public sphere. That not only further restricts ordinary people’s already limited freedom to speak their minds, but also harms growth by hampering investment. Most of all, it underscores Mr Zhao’s pressing question: on what basis is economic policy made? What does the government know that ordinary people do not—and how reliable is the information on which it is basing its decisions?
Deviations standard
China’s official economic data have always had their flaws. Li Keqiang, the previous prime minister, once questioned their accuracy. Economists have long grumbled that the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) does not provide enough detail about its methodologies. But China-watchers used to assume that the data would gradually become more comprehensive and reliable. Instead the reverse seems to be happening. Recent data on China’s capital account have been so contradictory—there has been a yawning discrepancy of about $230bn between customs and balance-of-payments statistics in recent years (see chart)—that America’s Treasury called on Chinese officials to clarify the figures. The resulting explanation was so convoluted that it only further confused matters. On August 19th, to the dismay of investors, China’s stock exchanges stopped publishing daily data on flows of foreign capital, a critical gauge of sentiment. The numbers will now be revealed only quarterly.
Meanwhile, the data that are made public are ever less consistent with the experience of firms and investors on the ground. The official numbers show that the GDP growth rate has reverted to pre-pandemic level, despite the moribund housing industry and low investment in infrastructure. This is a risible claim, says Logan Wright of Rhodium Group, a consulting firm. “The broader problem is simply that the GDP data have stopped bearing any resemblance to economic reality,” he explains.
The steady contortion of official statistics seems designed to obscure news that might embarrass the government. For instance, in mid-2023 a professor at Peking University said publicly that there were 16m young people without jobs who did not feature in the unemployment statistics because they had stopped looking for work. If they were taken into account, the professor asserted, the underemployment rate for youth would be over 46%. Within a month the NBS stopped issuing data on urban youth unemployment altogether. Then in January it began publishing an “improved and optimised” figure, which also happened to be far lower. Academics and journalists have had relatively little to say on the subject since then.
All hail the economy!
Officials’ bold claims about the economy often go unquestioned, at least in public. The government has declared that no one in China lives in absolute poverty any more—the sort of assertion that might naturally invite all kinds of questions about whether the data are correct and the right standards have been applied. Yet there has been almost no debate about the finding in the media.
In much the same vein, subjects of great importance to the economy, but of an awkward nature for officials, receive little scrutiny. The biggest victims of China’s property crash are the 20m-30m households that are thought to have paid for apartments that have never been completed. Understanding who these people are, how they are coping economically and what could be done to help them is critical to reviving the property market. Yet few economists appear to be conducting any research on these cheated millions.
The full economic effects of long, severe and unpopular lockdowns during the pandemic in cities such as Shanghai and Wuhan have never been publicly examined. In several cases journalists and social-media commentators broaching such topics have been jailed. The true number of deaths from covid-19 in China is unknown. A prominent scientist based in Shanghai who was looking into the origins of covid found himself locked out of his laboratory earlier this year. Officials seem much more interested in controlling discussion of the disease than in understanding its impact.
Even ardently pro-government pundits are sometimes silenced if their opinions have not received official approval. In late July Hu Xijin, a nationalist journalist, praised directives on the economy issued at a recent meeting of senior party leaders. But his interpretation of them as a boon for private enterprise apparently ruffled feathers. Posts to that effect were deleted from his social-media accounts, which then fell silent. The party, not content with regulating and managing markets and the economy, seems to be claiming a monopoly on interpreting them, too.
The reticence about discussing the economy extends to private interactions with foreigners. In theory the authorities are courting investors to help stimulate growth. Visiting businessmen confirm that meetings are easy to come by. But discussions lack substance, they complain. The pitches local officials make to attract investment to their region have become vague and formulaic, says one such visitor. There is little detail on local economic conditions. And securing more substantive meetings with regulators has become much harder.
Foreign academics report similar experiences. Universities are keen to hire professors with expertise in industry from abroad to compensate for an exodus of such people during the pandemic. But informal exchanges have become more strained. Visitors with long experience in China say they are able to see old contacts, but that their meetings must be reported to and approved by the authorities. Conducting field work in China has become increasingly difficult, says Huang Yanzhong of Seton Hall University in America, because contact with foreigners could present a risk to local people. “You sense the political environment and you don’t want to get people in trouble,” he says.
These sorts of restrictions also extend to foreign journalists. Many have returned to China after the pandemic to find their interactions with companies closely supervised by bureaucrats. In Hefei, an inland industrial city, big Chinese firms have been instructed not to speak to the press without permission from local authorities. Journalists are asked to submit hour-by-hour travel schedules along with the names and contact details of those they plan to interview. Some diplomats have been subjected to much the same treatment.
For those outside the country, getting access to information about the economy is even harder. The authorities appear to have asked Chinese firms selling corporate data to curb sales of certain statistics to foreigners. For example, one such firm, Wind, stopped providing information on online spending last year to users outside China. A database on corporate ownership compiled by Qichacha, a corporate-intelligence firm, is no longer accessible abroad. The firm also used to provide data on bankruptcies, but now says the information is “too sensitive”.
When a special economic zone in Shanghai set out rules earlier this year governing the use of data, it explicitly banned the transfer abroad of any information on stock prices or market trends, a surprising regulation for what is, after all, China’s financial hub. Stockbrokers are ever more reluctant to hand over analysts’ reports; negative takes on the economy or state policy are becoming rare. Some official data series on industrial output have started to vanish, Mr Wright says. A legal database that appeared online a decade ago is becoming less comprehensive and harder to access, says Rory Truex of Princeton University. When it comes to obtaining data, he says, “Nothing good in China can last.”
Access to China’s universities is also becoming more circumscribed, curtailing one of the main ways in which foreigners and locals alike improved their understanding of the Chinese economy. During the pandemic campuses, like most public spaces, were closed off; special permission was required to enter. But as much of China reopened early last year, some universities stayed shut. To this day visitors need permission in advance to set foot on these campuses. Academics at a number of institutions have been told they must seek approval to speak with foreign press. In a few regions this must be issued not by officials at their university, but by bureaucrats at the provincial level.
Since Mr Xi came to power in 2012 the conditions under which academics operate have become far more constrained. In 2019 several top universities amended their charters to make explicit reference to their loyalty to the Communist Party, which sparked a few small protests on campuses. Last year the party’s oversight committees at some universities began formally merging with the university administration. This, in effect, gives the party day-to-day control over how universities operate. This is a part of what Mr Xi has called “socialist education with Chinese characteristics”, which involves subordinating academic imperatives to the needs of the party. Academic freedom is at one of its lowest points since the Cultural Revolution, a period of fanaticism in the 1960s and 1970s, says Sun Peidong of Cornell University.
Much academic research remains relatively unfettered by political constraints because it has nothing to do with contemporary Chinese society. The government has heaped funding on the natural sciences, engineering and medicine, helping transform China into a powerhouse of scientific research. But the study of anything related to political, economic or social conditions within China, scholars say, has suffered badly under Mr Xi.
China’s universities are full of talented faculty, some of whom are still devising ways of writing about fraught topics. One method is to wrap critical ideas up in a politically correct coating. Corruption, for instance, tends to be too sensitive a topic on which to centre a research project, an academic explains. But a project that focuses on a prominent government initiative could include a portion on how that initiative has been affected by corruption. The crux of the research is in essence buried within a longer paper. Those who read academic papers, in turn, have become accustomed to wading through long reports to find small pearls of insight.
Controversial topics can be discussed as long as they omit any analysis of the central government’s policies. An economist specialising in Taiwan says he frequently writes papers that analyse the stances of the Taiwanese and American governments but simply exclude most information on China’s approach to the topic at hand. Some economic researchers have been able to conduct local surveys on controversial subjects, but have no intention of publishing them now. Instead they are sitting on their findings in the hope that a time will come when it is safe to publish them, Ms Sun claims.
The gradual strangulation of information about the economy is not just vexing for foreign investors and economists. It also raises the same question that Mr Zhao did in his censored article: on what basis do Mr Xi and other senior officials make decisions about how to manage the economy? They are not groping around in the dark. China has long maintained a confidential system for collecting information from academia, the news media and think-tanks. Journalists, researchers and economists are asked to pen “internal reference” reports, or neican in Chinese. These documents are commissioned at all levels of government. Local officials have access to analysis produced by local researchers. Trusted scholars at top universities and think-tanks, meanwhile, produce reports for the most senior leaders in Beijing.
Neican can be far punchier than material for public consumption. A report might demonstrate, say, that even though local officials talk excitedly about a boom in whizzy technologies such as AI or robotics, the actual benefit to the economy of these industries is woefully small. Academics and journalists can live something of a double life, producing both public reports and those meant only for the eyes of officials. A reporter at Xinhua, the state news agency, for instance, may appear to be churning out nothing but adulatory drivel, but behind the scenes could be writing explosive articles exposing polluting firms or corrupt officials. It is a privilege to be allowed to write internal reports, says one such author, noting that there is intense competition to do so.
Think-tanks are a mainstay of neican. Under Mr Xi, even as independent think-tanks have been forced to close, state-aligned ones have multiplied. The doors of the last prominent free-market think-tank in China, Unirule, were literally welded shut in 2019, briefly trapping some of its researchers inside. But hundreds of “think-tanks with Chinese characteristics” have been established by city and provincial governments, ministries and even some state-owned firms. Between 2018 and 2020 such outfits nearly tripled in number, from 507 to 1,413. (The fad is fading somewhat: by the end of last year there were only 1,096.) Most of the research they do is for internal consumption only. Their output can give officials a good understanding of the local dimensions of problems like the property crash, says a researcher. Another affirms that he is able to write openly about administrative problems such as the difficulty of implementing government edicts at odds with one another.
Some experts have speculated that China’s vast digital economy provides policymakers access to a trove of high-quality data about firms and consumers in real time. The state is building exchanges where data that companies collect on transactions can be bought and sold. But these platforms are still a work in progress. By the same token, China’s security services run a massive nationwide surveillance operation that by its very nature tracks the movement of people and goods and the opinions expressed by ordinary citizens. But there is no evidence that officials make use of such information to improve their understanding of the economy.
Errors thrive in darkness
The ultimate question is, how much of all this information filters through to the top echelons of the Communist Party? That is hard to say. Authors often brag about the influence of their neican reports, says Mr Huang, but there are no reliable data about who is having an impact on public policy. A researcher says he is informed if a senior official has made a note on one of his reports, but is not told what the note says. The profusion of think-tanks presumably delivers an enormous number of recommendations to different arms of the government. But Bob Chen, an investor based in Shanghai, recently argued on a local podcast called Baiguan that the centralisation of power at the apogee of the party means that the recipients no longer have the authority to push through whatever reforms the reports might espouse.
Moreover, it seems only natural that neican reports would tend to flatter the authorities. A state researcher notes that the more positive his analysis is, the better the reception it receives. That provides an obvious incentive to put an optimistic slant on things. The obverse also appears to be true: the same researcher who said he was free to discuss administrative problems also cautions that he never directly criticises policy edicts from on high.
No one outside the highest reaches of power understands exactly what Mr Xi reads and how he acts on the information. China’s economic policymaking has always been somewhat opaque, but this mattered less when growth was strong and policymakers appeared pragmatic. With growth deteriorating and the bureaucracy becoming more ideological, the dearth of good information about the economy is much more worrying. It may eventually become as big a problem for China’s leaders as it is for puzzled outsiders. ■
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This article appeared in the Briefing section of the print edition under the headline “Lowering the veil”