2024-09-10
7 分钟Hello, it's Alice Su here.
I'm the co-host of Drum Tower, our weekly podcast on China.
You're about to hear an article from the latest edition of The Economist.
Enjoy.
China's giant economy faces an equally giant crisis of confidence,
and a growing deficit of accurate information is only making things worse.
Even as the country wrestles with a property crash,
the services sector slowed by one measure in August.
Consumers are fed up.
Multinational firms are taking money out of China at a record pace,
and foreign China watchers are trimming their forecasts for economic growth.
The gloom reflects real problems, from half-built houses to bad debts.
But it also reflects growing mistrust of information about China.
The government is widely believed to be massaging data,
suppressing sensitive facts and sometimes offering delusional prescriptions for the economy.
This void feeds on itself.
The more fragile the economy is,
the more knowledge is suppressed and the more nerves fray.
This is not just a cyclical problem of confidence.
By backtracking on the decades-long policy of partially liberalising the flow of information,