I’ve been skeptical of the official Chinese government economic statistics for quite some time, so I find articles like this one to be quite believable:
Chanos and the other bears point to several key pieces of evidence that China is heading for a crash.
First, they point to the enormous Chinese economic stimulus effort — with the government spending $900 billion to prop up a $4.3 trillion economy. “Yet China’s economy, for all the stimulus it has received in 11 months, is underperforming,” Gordon Chang, author of “The Coming Collapse of China,” wrote in Forbes at the end of October. “More important, it is unlikely that [third-quarter] expansion was anywhere near the claimed 8.9 percent.”
Chang argues that inconsistencies in Chinese official statistics — like the surging numbers for car sales but flat statistics for gasoline consumption — indicate that the Chinese are simply cooking their books. He speculates that Chinese state-run companies are buying fleets of cars and simply storing them in giant parking lots in order to generate apparent growth.
Back in 2004, I wrote:
While there is no doubt that China is a fast-growing economy, the most common mistake among both investors and pundits is to assume that China is really just like South Carolina or Ireland . . . a formerly depressed area now achieving good results from modernization. The problem is that China is not just the next Atlanta, Georgia or Slovenia. China is still, more or less, a command economy with a capitalist face. One of the biggest players in the Chinese economy is the army, and not just in the sense of being a big purchaser of capital goods (like the United States Army, for example).
The Chinese army owns or controls huge sectors of the economy, and runs them in the same way it would run a division or an army corps. The very term “command economy” would seem to have been minted to describe this situation. The numbers reported by these “companies” bear about the same resemblance to reality as thos posted by Enron or Worldcom. With so much of their economy not subject to profit and loss, every figure from China must be viewed as nothing more than a guess (at best) or active disinformation.
Probably the only figures that can be depended upon for any remote accuracy would be the imports from other countries — as reported by the exporting firms, not by their importing counterparts — and the exports to other countries. All internal numbers are political, not economic. When a factory manager can be fired, he has his own financial future at stake. When he can be sentenced to 20 years of internal exile, he has his life at stake. There are few rewards for honesty in that sort of environment: and many inducements to go along with what you are told to do.
Under those circumstances, any growth figures are going to be aggregated from all sectors, most of which are under strong pressure to report the right numbers, not necessarily corresponding with any real measurement of economic activity. So, if the economic office wants to see a drop in the economy, that’s what they’ll get.
Basing your own personal financial plans on numbers like this would quickly have you living in a cardboard box under a highway overpass. Companies in the soi-disant free world have shareholders or owners to answer to. Companies in China exist in a totally different environment.
Five years on, there’s not much (except a few outdated details) that I’d bother changing.
H/T to Ghost of a Flea for the link.
