Bad news is bad news. It’s so bad that according to Tibetan Review, China’s economists are “under gag orders against airing” it (August 6, 2023):
Seven well-regarded economists have told the Financial Times that their employers had told them some topics were off-limits for public discussion. The China Securities and Regulatory Commission, the stock regulator, was stated to have accused brokerage analysts of playing up risks facing the economy, “which is suffering from weak consumer demand, declining exports and an ailing property sector.”
Two think-tank scholars and two brokerage economists, all of whom serve as government advisers, have said there was pressure to present economic news positively to increase public confidence.
“The regulator doesn’t want to hear negative comments about the economy in public,” an adviser to the central bank has said.
The Financial Times report, available at afr.com, is behind a paywall.
Since investors and capitalists make decisions about whether to invest or start a new business and so forth in part on the basis of the best possible objective assessments of the economy, preventing the articulation of such assessments can only make it harder to make a good decision. Would an increase in the number of bad economic decisions make the economy better or worse?
In private, though, economists and consultants are willing to say that the official government statistics are untrustworthy and that the Chinese economy is headed for a fall. So maybe news of the murky but bad real situation is getting out somehow even in China, not just in Western media.
