Markets Shocked as China Postpones Release of GDP Data

Market analysts have been surprised by the decision of China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) to postpone the release of Q3 GDP data which was due on Tuesday.

A spokesperson said that the change was “due to adjustment to work arrangements,” but this decision is unprecedented.

“I’ve not come across before a situation where a whole raft of statistical reporting has just been postponed, in nearly half a century of monitoring data releases — not even in times of pestilence and conflict,” said George Magnus, a former chief economist of UBS who is now an associate at the China Center at Oxford University.

Their calendar does not provide a new date for when the data will be released, raising speculation in regards to the performance of the economy in the third quarter.

Analyst estimates are that it grew by 3%, missing the target of 5.5%, but the third quarter had some of the strictest lockdowns with the economy growing just 0.4% in Q2.

It may well have gone into a recession in the Q3 as a property crash continued in July.

That has fed into a mortgage default movement as Chinese house buyers, who have put down mortgage funds for a new house prior to its construction, stop paying the mortgage as many of these houses won’t be finished.

The rise in interest rates has also led to a withdrawal of foreign capital as the Western economies now provide better yield.

That has contributed to a crash in Chinese stocks, while China’s Yuan has fallen by 12.5% from 6.3 to the dollar, to 7.2.

Overall, Chinese citizens have seen the biggest decline in their living standards in living memory, with Xi Jinping turning the focus to ‘security’ from economic prosperity in his speech at the gathering of China’s Communist Party delegates.

Those delegates are to vote on who will lead the party for the next five years amid the worst economic crisis since data began in the 1990s.

That economy so being a sore spot, Xi presumably has decided to delay the release of the data until he has secured a third term, as most of the commentariat expects because he has spent the last decade putting only loyalists in the role of those that get to elect, purging the rest with the most heavy handed fist since Mao Zedong.

It is that Mao to whom Xi appealed in a leaked Document 9 back in 2013 where he complained that “some people took advantage of Comrade Mao Zedong’s 120th birthday in order to deny the scientific and guiding value of Mao Zedong thought.”

The dictatorship of Mao led to mass starvation in China with some speculating that Xi would like to return to those same policies.

He claims for example in that document which is thought to have his fingerprints all over it, that principles like the free market, free press, human rights, and businessmen running businesses, are “anti-China.”

He would rather instead there be a “Marxist perspective,” even though it is indisputable that communism led to starvation both in the Soviet Union and in pre-reforms China.

A China that has its elite now deciding whether this one man is more important than the entire country, and whether this one man can be entrusted with an unprecedented third term that may spook the market.

Because, the return of Xi will show that China is far too rigid to expect any competence in its handling of the serious economic difficulties it is currently facing.

Such difficulties therefore may get even worse as business uncertainty becomes enshrined due to China’s inability to change its leader even though a global pandemic began on his watch, and the economy is so tarnished he does not even dare publish the GDP data.

Is one man really worth so much to China, and if he is, can China expect the world to say anything else than this would be the coronation of a dictator, a return of Mao, and an end to prosperity as Xi ends his second term with an economic crisis.