China’s Government Hides, Deletes and Censors Economic Data

When China’s government resorts to what seems as equivocating data in the face of a  cash or liquidity squeeze and a reported deepening manufacturing slowdown, this only arouses suspicions of a large scale cover-up of the real economic and financial conditions.

Today, the Bloomberg reports of China’s  selective statistical reporting or hiding of data sets:

China suspended the release of industry-specific data from a monthly survey of manufacturing purchasing managers, with an official saying there’s limited time to analyze the large volume of responses.

“We now have 3,000 samples in the survey, and from a technical point of view, time is very limited -- there are many industries, you know,” Cai Jin, vice president of the China Federation of Logistics & Purchasing, which compiles the data with the National Bureau of Statistics, told reporters yesterday in Beijing.

The disappearance of data on industries including steel adds to issues hampering analysis of the world’s second-biggest economy, after fake invoices inflated trade numbers this year. The manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index also omitted readings on export orders, imports and inventories without any explanation from the government.

Earlier China has been reported to have been deleting data, from another Bloomberg article:

An official report on China’s manufacturing in June omitted numbers for export orders, imports and inventories of finished goods, without any explanation for the gaps.

Five of 12 sub-indexes usually released with the Purchasing Managers’ Index were absent from today’s releases from the National Bureau of Statistics and the China Federation of Logistics and Purchasing. The others were for backlogs of work and quantities of purchases. The statistics bureau didn’t immediately respond to e-mailed questions asking for comment.

Analysts seeking a fuller picture of China’s economy could turn to an English-language version of the report released in Hong Kong by the Fung Business Intelligence Center, which included the missing numbers. Inflated trade figures this year highlighted flaws and omissions in data that investors rely on for assessing the strength of the world’s second-biggest economy.

The objective of data manipulation is to conceal or suppress the truth, thus the above won’t be complete without censorship.

And censorship it has been...as the Zero Hedge reports: (bold original)

FT reports that with (the extensively reported here) cash crunch roiling the Chinese economy, "propaganda authorities have told local media to tone down their reporting to help stabilise financial markets. In a directive written last week and transmitted over the past few days to newspapers and television stations, local propaganda departments of the Communist party instructed reporters to stop “hyping the so-called cash crunch” and to spread the message that the country’s markets are well stocked with money."

So far, China’s major equity benchmark, the Shanghai index, appears to have nonchalantly rebounded along with the orchestrated smoothing out of what has been uninspiring economic performance.

The 64 gazillion renminbi question: will all these attempts to smokescreen reality be sustainable? Or will economic gravity prevail?

The Japan’s central bank, the Bank of Japan (BoJ) considers developments in China as the “biggest risk” to recovery, according to the Wall Street Journal.

While this may be partly true, the BoJ appears to be shifting the blame of the potential unintended consequences from their bold ‘Abenomics’ policies to extraneous forces.

The point being: there seems to be too many potential flashpoints for a global debt crisis to occur...anytime.