China economic outlook: Govt says all is well, but there’s gloom on the ground

SHANGHAI: To the residents and business owners of Chedun, a working-class neighborhood in the southwestern outskirts of Shanghai, the signs of an anemic economy are all around. The factories that once drew workers from around the country have moved away. Those that remain have slashed wages. Around the affordable eateries and motley shops where workers once crowded, employees eagerly latch onto anyone passing by.

“No one has money now, it’s obvious,” Cherry Qian, 25, said as she sat inside the electronics store she manages. But there’s one place the slump isn’t as obvious: in the government’s account of it.

A gulf has emerged between the Chinese economy as many Chinese are experiencing it, and Beijing’s narrative of it — and that gulf is only widening. For many ordinary Chinese, one of the worst economic slowdowns the country has faced in decades has translated into widespread pessiYouth at a job fair in Wuhan mism and resignation. But state media and officials continue to declare that any challenges are blips.


Concerns about the economy, propaganda outlets have insisted, have been inflated by Western politicians and media outlets engaged in “cognitive warfare.” One social media account backed by China’s state broadcaster released a video that purported to investigate how foreign news outlets had cherry-picked statistics that predicted higher economic growth, just so they could later say China fell short.

When the reality has proved too inconvenient, another approach has simply been to conceal it, as when Beijing this month stopped publishing the youth unemployment rate, which had been at a record high.

Differing official and on-the-ground narratives are hardly new in China, with its tightly controlled censorship apparatus. But the contrast is especially stark now, when the public’s gloom is so widespread, from the wealthy elite to workers.