Gordon G. Chang
At first glance, Biden's gloomy assessment looks wrong. The official National Bureau of Statistics reported that China's gross domestic product beat expectations by a wide margin, growing 5 percent in the first calendar quarter of this year compared to the same period last year. That's a slight improvement of the robust 5 percent growth for all of last year.
But neither of these reports makes sense. As Anne Stevenson-Yang of J Capital Research told me this week, "I feel the numbers just don't mean anything anymore."
There is now a large gap between reported results and what we can observe. The widely followed Rhodium Group believes the economy grew about 1.5 percent last year. That's in the ballpark of the "now close to 2 percent a year" that Biden reportedly told a group of Democratic Party donors in Park City, Utah last August.
Growth has almost certainly declined since then. "China's economy is in a slow grind downwards," Andrew Collier of Hong Kong-based Orient Capital Research told me.
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