> China's GDP is growing at 6.3%.

It's not clear to me the extent one can trust the official numbers from China.

Would you like to provide some evidence to the contrary for that or just a general "It's probably not true"?

You could say the same about Western government debt that's creatively accounted, unemployment rates which avoid underemployment/participation and inflation which desperately needs to remain low to keep bond rates from bankrupting public balance sheets.

Here are a couple western think tanks who evaluated recent Chinese economic stats - CSIS in particular comprehensively reverse engineered Chinese GDP reporting from ground up- and concluded China is (1 trillion USD) larger than official numbers purports to be.

Whole "Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak” Sun Tzu thing.

Broken Abacus? A More Accurate Gauge of China's Economy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOxIJMjZOUo&

Louis-Vincent Gave: China- myths, propaganda and realities | SKAGEN New Year Conference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9hFAlqKmfM

My own government in Australia has the official unemployment rate which is contradicted every time with independent analysis by a well-known multinational firm. Not fractions of a percent either, full percentage points difference.

Argue about pennies all you want. China are eating up more and more of world GDP. In 1998 they produced 3% of the worlds total output. Choose whatever source you want to see where it is now.

Either people can wake up to it or continue consuming media pleasantries that make them feel better.

The Fed has been talking about U6 since before Yellen took the chair. The Fed's entire dovish stance on interest rates was publicly predicated on low labor force participation being unaccounted-for slack.

The unemployment rate vs labor force participation has been a part of Presidential debates since 2012, and also figured in the 2010 Congressional elections.

If you want to know more about how U.S. government debt is accounted for, the various Federal Reserve websites are informative, if a bit dry.

The China growth rate is probably not far from the truth, but there is not much public data published to back it up. It's reasonable to be skeptical. I think there's reason to believe that their actual growth rate is higher in some years and lower in others, as an artifact of the difficulty in getting accurate numbers.

I'm curious about your comparison of China to the United States. It seems like a whataboutism argument, which isn't really to the point of the topic.

> if a bit dry

That's part of the problem. Journalists avoid a deep dive into the nitty gritty that might muddy the narrative. Of course economists discuss this and are more aware of it than any other group. But how stats are presented (marketed?) on the outside should be of concern to anyone caring about their own democratic system where this stuff sways millions of votes.

> seems like a whataboutism argument

It's tiring to see this said here. Quite sure it's not tolerated much lately as a singular/only response either. It is ingrained human nature to compare others, particularly those with similar traits. To shut down discussion with a single word is incredibly disingenuous and unhelpful to modern discourse.

Give me 10 mins and I can tell you 100 things the US does far better than China. I really doubt the same claims of whataboutism would be made in the opposite direction.

Don't let nationalism cloud your judgement friend. It's a big wide diverse world with a bunch of viewpoints.

> whataboutism

Fair enough, it's a term that is only accurate if the arguer is employing deception. You were not. You genuinely didn't know about labor participation being a large part of the public discourse for the past 9 years.

China has been cooking the books on their GDP for years: https://geopoliticalfutures.com/china-admits-its-statistics-...

Oh I think you may be right. They might have been understating their GDP. I remember few yrs ago Bloomberg wrote a piece explaining why the Chinese bureaucrats have incentives to under-report.

I'm talking about this figure. Asking for evidence to the contrary that it's not 6.3%. If so what do you think it is? 3%? 2%? Perhaps 6.1%?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-25/china-s-l...

Newer research says it could be half the 6.3%.

https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/bpea_20...

https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/2189245/c...

Thanks, which page or figure on the Brookings pdf should I be looking at?

Try page 1:

"China’s national accounts are based on data collected by local governments. However, since local governments are rewarded for meeting growth and investment targets, they have an incentive to skew local statistics. China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) adjusts the data provided by local governments to calculate GDP at the national level. The adjustments made by the NBS average 5% of GDP since the mid-2000s. On the production side, the discrepancy between local and aggregate GDP is entirely driven by the gap between local and national estimates of industrial output. On the expenditure side, the gap is in investment. Local statistics increasingly misrepresent the true numbers after 2008, but there was no corresponding change in the adjustment made by the NBS. Using publicly available data, we provide revised estimates of local and national GDP by re-estimating output of industrial, construction, wholesale and retail firms using data on value-added taxes. We also use several local economic indicators that are less likely to be manipulated by local governments to estimate local and aggregate GDP. The estimates also suggest that the adjustments by the NBS were insufficient after 2008. Relative to the official numbers, we estimate that GDP growth from 2008-2016 is 1.7 percentage points lower and the investment and savings rate in 2016 is 7 percentage points lower."

you are right. probably China has always been under reporting their growth rate as the hide your strength strategy. It's inexplicable that China's GDP from construction is smaller than that of U.S., given that China is undergoing an infrastructure build up at a scale that human race has never seen.

China is still doing well. You don’t need official numbers! Just look at Chinese tourists if you live near a tourist destination. They travel more than any time and they spend a lot. While this is not anything like a real economic metric, it is a reflection of what is happening there.

Bear in mind GDP can be manipulated yet true at the same time.

If the government tweaks regulations, lending criteria and does other things to trigger huge spending on building pointless ghost cities, that will legitimately increase GDP because GDP is just summing up "stuff being done". There's a very subtle but deeply embedded assumption in western talk about GDP: that high GDP indicates a lot of useful things are being made and sold. But in a hard-left economy like China that correlation is weak; it's possible for lots of people to be doing things that aren't useful.

Even the second most powerful man in China does not trust official GDP figures. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Keqiang_index

1984, 7.23% :)

Plus, you really trust the number which come from CCP?

So nearly 40 years ago, many here weren't even born.

Do you trust Bloomberg? https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-25/china-s-l...

Take a look around "中國 GDP 灌水", lead to this latest research claim that China's GDP has been misrepresent after 2008.

CITE: Relative to the official numbers, we estimate that GDP growth from 2008-2016 is 1.7 percentage points lower and the investment and savings rate in 2016 is 7 percentage points lower.

Ref: https://www.brookings.edu/bpea-articles/a-forensic-examinati...

I'm well aware of the history, thanks for the link. We are in a comment section of an article on this latest print and I was responding to a comment which says it doesn't trust the official figures.

Provided evidence to the contrary.

Do you think this GDP number is wrong and if so by how much?

Do you trust the statistics coming out of the Chinese Communist Party?

I’ve been seeing the same article here rehashed since I was in elementary school over 20 years ago.

I trust CCP statistics as much as I trust western reports about China. Which is to say, not at all.

China probably isn’t as rich or powerful as it projects, but it’s also clearly not as weak and fragile as American media has been hoping all these decades.

That's unwise, you can call the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) up and ask them how they arrived at their numbers. In the UK you can go on field trips with the Office of National Statistics (ONS) to watch them measure inflation. It's materially different.

Data messaging is a legitimate and well established study and practice

I think given China’s population growth, if the GDP doesn’t grow 6%, its considered a recession for them.

> given China's population growth

Their population growth is lower than most of the West, some argue it even contracted last year. Why is everyone on this site so wildly misinformed about the largest country on Earth? Is this a US thing?

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/01/17/world/asia/ch...

It is normal for Americans to think that other countries don't matter. That's why they're missing the point that China is already the richest country in the world and it is growing at double the pace of the US.

The detriments of the one child policy are well documented. Positive growth and negative growth both inform on the overall birth rate.

Also, largest country on Earth? I do believe China is #4 after Russia, Canada, and the US in terms of SquareKM.

One-child policy is long gone though. A two-child policy exists perhaps for some. The article does an excellent job summing up the demographic hurdles they face.

I personally think any country that can economically prosper without resorting to unsustainable population growth or environmental damage should be congratulated on the world stage.

China is managing to do one of those things.

Technological advancement should be the focus of developed nations wanting to thrive without taking the easy gdp heroin hit of over-populating, which is essentially unaccounted future debt heaped upon younger generations.

Wiki says China is the third largest, after Russia, Canada. US is the fourth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...