If the Chinese Communist Party has decided to stop publishing a statistic, you can be pretty sure it wasn't expecting cheerful numbers.
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A data series that it has just suppressed is in fact a particularly worrying one for the party - youth unemployment. Lots of idle and discontented young people are just about the last thing that an authoritarian government wants. They get bolshie, you see.
A lot of other Chinese economic statistics are also looking weak, and some economists wonder whether the country is heading into the sort of prolonged stagnation that Japan suffered after its economic bubble burst in the late 1980s and early 1990s. That would be dreadful for the Chinese people, but - let's be honest - good news for Australia.
The Chinese economy suffered badly last year from increasingly desperate pandemic-containment measures, then it copped a sharp hit in December when the government finally accepted it had lost control of the virus and let infection explode across the country.
After that, the question was whether the economy would roar back.
It hasn't.
In one example of its troubles, real estate developers are struggling to stay afloat. Though that's a familiar story in a downturn anywhere, it's a bigger issue in China, where some of the companies are truly enormous and where real estate and associated activity are supposed to account for 25-30 per cent of the economy.
![China President Xi Jinping faces a tough time as the real estate industry tanks. Picture Shutterstock, Getty Images China President Xi Jinping faces a tough time as the real estate industry tanks. Picture Shutterstock, Getty Images](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/pMXRnDj3SUU44AkPpn97sC/b82f20b3-d1d5-45ac-a72e-cee6b021e0f2.png/r0_0_1200_675_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
Then there's unemployment, which in overall terms does not look too bad. In June, 5.2 per cent of working-age people in cities and towns who wanted jobs didn't have one. That unemployment rate was not alarmingly high and was in fact typical of recent years. It edged up to 5.3 per cent in July.
But for people aged 16 to 24, the June urban unemployment rate was 21.3 per cent, which was a record high and about a quarter above than the average of the past couple of years. We don't know the July number, because the statistics office said this week it had suspended publication of labour data broken down by age groups.
Keeping the numbers secret won't create jobs for young people but will at least eliminate a monthly incitement for public discussion about the subject. The CCP obviously does not expect the rate to fall, otherwise it would be pleased to keep publishing it.
Other data for July was pretty bad. Investment, industrial output and retail sales were all weaker than expected. The government particularly wants to see strong retail figures as evidence of success in its campaign to get people to spend more on consumption.
It wants them to do so because the old drivers of economic growth - investment and exports - are not as reliable as they used to be. Returns on investment have fallen as the economy has developed and as it has over-invested in some sectors, raising risks of bubbles bursting. President Xi Jinping's aggressive foreign policy, meanwhile, is encouraging other countries to try to reduce reliance on China's exports.
In looking for more private consumption, the government's challenge is that Chinese, in general, are great savers: they don't consume as much of their incomes as people in developed economies do.
A few years ago, a friend in Beijing had a low wage and a lot of reasons to spend more on her needy family. But when she had an opportunity to cheaply buy a new investment flat from the city government, she put down a deposit and squeezed her household spending down even further to make progress payments.
In Australia, private consumption spending is about 50 per cent of GDP; in China, it's about 38 per cent. With the end of pandemic controls, there was hope that Chinese would be rushing into the shops and restaurants and ordering lots more stuff on line, but so far it's not happening.
The Chinese government may well find a way through the economic slowdown, using low interest rates and its usual method of throwing money at infrastructure; maybe it will hand out cash for consumption, too. Then, in the longer term, the economy may grow at a moderate pace, still faced with an ageing population and weak investment returns.
But some economists see a risk of a much worse outlook. They note how high indebtedness in China, excessive investment and the deflating of bubbly asset prices are reminiscent of Japan at the beginning of the 1990s. Since 1991, Japan's annual economic growth rate has averaged just 0.7 per cent a year, compared with Australia's 3 per cent.
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There was a time when we have hated to see China suffering economic stagnation. Prosperity in one country promotes prosperity in others, especially trading partners. We still export plenty of iron ore to China.
Personally, I want my many friends in the country to have secure jobs and healthy pay rises. I hope they can afford such things as holidays in Australia, particularly since I can't go back to there to see them.
But the hard fact is that China is a danger to our security. And the risk of it dominating this side of the world is ultimately based on its wealth and the resulting economic influence and military power that it wields.
Economists criticise zero-sum thinking - as in the idea "You lose, so I win." Rather, they point out, economic growth creates a general rise in wellbeing. On average, we can all win, and that applies to countries as well as to individuals.
Strategic international competition, however, really is a zero-sum thing. China's economic problems are good for us - assuming, of course, that Xi doesn't start a war to distract Chinese public attention from the state of the economy.
- Bradley Perrett was based in Beijing as a journalist from 2004 to 2020.