Commentary
The recent China data often shocked the market, foreigners, and local analysts. Sometimes it was a fight between the official and private data sources like PMI; sometimes, it was a mismatch between domestic and foreign sources like trade data.
A few years ago, China data were well-known to be fake: Whatever number the government claimed a figure should be, it would turn out to be that number.
However, data look less abnormal in recent years than in the olden days. Yet, the official releases are still far from our actual understanding.
In the past, when Western countries did plan to open up a more than one billion market in China, they would pay special attention to the domestic economic performance….
