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For years, while mainstream commentators have gawped at China’s ‘economic miracle’, one thing has continually nagged me: according to whom? Well, we know exactly the answer to that: according to the Chinese Communist Party.
Make no mistake: ‘official Chinese statistics’ are CCP propaganda. Nothing more, nothing less. Even many supposedly third-party sources rely ultimately on official data.
Some, however, make a stab at independent analysis. This is very much guesswork, trying to estimate hard data by inference, but they’re finally pointing out the emperor’s clothes are looking a tad see-through.
Despite the ongoing trade confrontation with the United States, Beijing says China’s economy grew by five per cent in 2025. The figure precisely matches the regime’s pre-set target and has reignited skepticism among economists and analysts over the credibility of the country’s official economic data.
Well, how about that? Beijing sets a target and, voila! the economy just happens to meet it, exactly. Who’da thunkit?
It marked the third consecutive year that the Chinese regime had set – and claimed to meet – an annual growth target of around five per cent.
To critics, the announcement sounded less like an economic result than a political deliverable.
“The fact that the GDP number once again lands exactly on the pre-announced target is astonishing in itself,” Wang He, a China current affairs analyst, told the Epoch Times. “For years, the outside world has believed that China manipulates its GDP figures. The numbers are not truly credible – they’re more of a statistical game.”
And so, like the beasts of Animal Farm, noticing that, for all of Squealer’s long strips of paper, the reality on the farm seemed very different, some economists are starting to think maybe they would sooner see less figures and more food.
NBS data shows that China’s economy grew 4.5 per cent year over year in the fourth quarter – the slowest pace in three years. The slowdown came amid continued stress from a prolonged real-estate downturn, weakening domestic demand, subdued market confidence, and persistent external pressure from trade confrontations with Washington.
Taken together, these conditions have reinforced perceptions of an economy struggling to regain momentum – at odds with the upbeat tone of headline growth figures.
Why would the CCP lie about economic growth? Well, firstly, they’re a communist dictatorship and it’s what communist dictatorships do. More importantly, without the narrative of miraculous economic growth, the CCP is shorn of more of its remaining legitimacy.
Economic growth remains a central indicator in China’s totalitarian system, shaping policy narratives and the regime’s evaluations and promotions of officials.
And that is a heck of an incentive to lie through their teeth.
A recent Oxford University Press book, “Command of Commerce: America’s Enduring Economic Power Advantage over China,” argues that China’s GDP may be overstated by as much as one-third. Authors Stephen Brooks and Ben Vagle attribute the gap to performance-driven data manipulation and large-scale investment projects that generate limited real economic returns.
By analyzing nighttime satellite imagery – a widely used proxy for real economic activity – the authors concluded that China’s true economic size may be closer to half of the US economy, rather than the roughly two-thirds implied by official figures […]
“The bottom line,” [Sun Kuo-Hsiang, a professor of international affairs and business at Nanhua University in Taiwan] said, “is that when official data loses credibility, China’s influence and trust within the international financial system inevitably decline.”
Wait… China has trust within the international financial system? Maybe it’s time to seek out international investors for that bridge on the Moon I’ve got to sell.
