China’s economic downturn, many places now “ghost cities”.
The National Bureau of Statistics of the Communist Party of China (NBSC) released economic data for 2020 on the 18th, claiming that GDP grew by 2.3% year-on-year in 2019, including a 2.9% increase in fixed asset investment and a 3.9% drop in total retail sales of consumer goods. However, under the Epidemic of the CCP virus (novel coronavirus disease, COVID-19) ravaging the world and highly questioned by outsiders about the authenticity of the data, some experts’ analysis shows that the CCP data statistics are only meant to serve political intentions.
In a note accompanying the economic data released on the 18th, the National Bureau of Statistics of the Communist Party of China (NBSC) said it revised the data on fixed asset investment and total retail sales of social consumer goods for 2019, meaning that it adjusted the 2019 data downward to allow fixed asset investment to become growth in 2020, while reducing the decline in total retail sales of social consumer goods. Xia Yeliang, a former associate professor at Peking University’s School of Economics who lives in the United States, said in an interview with our reporter on the 20th that the CCP has a long history of falsifying statistics, and the situation is very common.
Xia Yeliang: “China’s statistics have always been falsified. In Mao Zedong era, it goes without saying that basically the top wants what data that the people below will follow the instructions of the central government, according to the leader’s intention to do. So in China, officials generally say that they have to prepare more than three sets of data to respond to different needs. Then after the 1990s China introduced some international statistical methods, statistical standards, and then professional training for personnel, it seems more professional, more accurate, but in fact still serve political intentions, so this data falsification situation is very prominent, so it “figures out of officials, officials out of figures Therefore, “figures out of officials, officials out of figures”. In the past I once knew an old Anhui Province, the director of the Bureau of Statistics, he was too timid to fake too much, the results were removed from the provincial party secretary.”
The day the economic data was announced, the mainland media also boasted that if all the houses in Shenzhen were sold at market value, they could buy half of the United States; it was also reported that mainland property experts predicted that there was still great room for Shenzhen house prices to rise at present, and that future Shenzhen house prices could reach more than 300,000/㎡. Xia Yeliang believes that, from an international professional point of view, the abnormally high prices of Chinese real estate should be something to be ashamed of, while the Chinese Communist Party propaganda thinking is just the opposite.
Xia Yeliang: “One thing he is not ashamed of, but proud of, is the abnormally high prices of Chinese real estate, that is, abnormally high, abnormally high. Because he mentioned that the price of real estate in Shenzhen, the future may reach 300,000 yuan a square meter, he said it will soon reach 300,000 yuan a square meter. But if it is 300,000 yuan a square meter, then it means that he is far beyond his actual value. Why do you think his land price is so high, if he is a residential, why is this price so high, who is there to live it. Is it the profiteers? It is the kind of big corruption, big embezzlers, corrupt officials, crooked businessmen who can afford to live in such a house, right? By world standards, if Shenzhen is 300,000 yuan a square foot, it exceeds the real estate prices of the most important cities in the world, such as New York and Tokyo. So this is not credible.”
Xia Yeliang analysis, the Chinese Communist Party propaganda thinking is the opposite of the world’s national values, this incident just shows that there is a part of China, whether officials or some tycoon type of businessmen, they are a very strong mob mentality, coupled with a distorted nationalist thinking, the illusion that they can buy everything with money at every turn, often become the international laughing stock.
Xia Yeliang: “His mentality is distorted, he did not receive a minimum of Education, upbringing, that is, do not understand the common sense, logic, these most basic values, so he moved to think that I can buy everything in the world. Xi Jinping thinks that the whole world is at my disposal, that I have a lot of money, that I can do the Belt and Road, that I can buy some countries, buy some politicians, buy a lot of educational institutions, that I can do whatever I want. But eventually you will find that the world is not as simple as they think, he may indeed be able to buy part of it, but eventually when people find that the Chinese are taking such a tactic, they are such a value and thinking, then if the whole world to boycott China, then China will have no market, the future is difficult to move.”
Hong Kong‘s Fax News Agency reported on Jan. 18 that the 2019 fixed asset investment figures and total retail sales of consumer goods, both of which should fall 5.9 percent and 4.8 percent year-on-year, respectively, with reference to the pre-revision 2019 data. The annual and monthly values in the latest economic data released by the CCP do not match in total, and there are discrepancies between the two, indicating that the CCP is faking the data by revising down the previous year’s data.
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