It already fell in 2015. A growing economy?
OK, we’ve heard the official story. China is transitioning from a manufacturing economy to a consumption-based economy. Consumers are king. They’re going to buy stuff. And that’s going to heat up the economy.
Imports and exports have been plunging for months, but no big deal, Chinese consumers – and there are a lot of them – are going to pull the economy forward. That’s the official story.
So now we stumble on a report on the Facebook page of the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party. The report was helpfully in English. And it was a peculiar location for a report on China: Facebook is still blocked in China.
So the fact the Communist Party rag published it in English and on a venue that is blocked in China makes it seem like this piece of information is not for the Chinese. Maybe it was slipped in by some underling over the weekend while supervisors weren’t paying attention.
This post was published at Wolf Street by Wolf Richter ‘ March 19, 2016.
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