Chinese officials are struggling to project confidence at home and abroad while censoring data about youth unemployment.
In an attempt to explain away a clamp down on underwhelming data, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said Thursday: "Some statistical indicators that no longer reflect the reality have been adjusted and removed. We have released more statistical data and promptly added indicators that people need to know.”
JOBLESS CLAIMS NUMBERS ARE SENDING A SURPRISING MESSAGE ABOUT THE ECONOMY
In April, China posted record-setting youth unemployment figures, when the regime reported that 20.4% of 16-24-year-olds can’t find work. Those figures have got worse every month through July, now prompting the National Bureau of Statistics to halt the release of data, and Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping’s associates moved to allay internal misgivings about the state of the Chinese economy.
In remarks made back in February behind closed doors, but that were only released on Wednesday, Xi said: “We should be patient and move forward in a steadfast manner. It is quite a challenge just to make sure 1.4 billion people are fed. Then there are problems such as employment, [wealth] distribution, education, healthcare, housing, elderly care and childcare. They are all not easy to resolve and they all involve an astronomical number of people.”
Chinese officials have separately tried to argue that Japanese officials are “tampering with data,” as Wang put it Thursday, related to the management of the Fukushima nuclear plant accident in 2011. Yet Beijing’s image-conscious approach to its own economic data exposed Chinese officials to American derision as U.S. officials prepare for a major summit with Japan and South Korea.
“[The Japanese officials] have been unbelievably transparent,” Ambassador Rahm Emanuel, the lead U.S. envoy to Japan, said Wednesday during an event in Washington. “Their efforts of being forthright with the public [are] a lot different than basically saying we’re not publishing youth unemployment anymore.”
A spokesman for China’s economic data bureau argued that it is controversial to include college students in the economic report.
"The main task of school students is to study, and there are different views on whether students looking for jobs before graduation should be included in labor force surveys and statistics,” NBS spokesman Fu Linghui said. “The employment situation is generally stable, and the employment rate of graduates is slightly higher than that of the same period last year.”
Yet Chinese officials also recognize a need to manage “social expectations” about the flagging economy.
“[We] have to make sure that we fulfill our targets for the whole year,” Chinese Premier Li Qiang said Wednesday, per the South China Morning Post. “[We] must enhance endogenous momentum, improve social expectations and resolve risks and hidden dangers.”
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And that effort dovetailed with the belated publication of Xi’s call in February for “patient” understanding that the job of managing China’s economy is a difficult one.
“We should first consider the size of the population and the large rural-urban development gap,” Xi said. “A super big population can provide sufficient manpower and a super big domestic market, but it also brings about a series of difficulties and challenges.”