Taps Coogan – November 23rd, 2021

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Christopher Balding, former professor at Peking University’s HSBC Business School and the Fulbright University of Vietnam, recently spoke with American Thought Leaders’ Jan Jekielek to describe what led him to become an early critic of the establishment narrative on China: the stark difference between the China he was reading about in reports written in New York and DC and the China he was seeing while living and working there.

 

Chris Balding on the disconnect between the establishment Western narrative and reality:

“When I started saying things about China, this was probably 2012, 2013, something like that, and I was reading things that people in Washington DC were saying about China, and I was saying ‘This is just not based in reality. This is not what’s going on on the ground here.’ And, this is one of my very common frustrations about with a lot of what is written about China coming from Washington DC and New York City… These people have just not spent either any time in China or Vietnam, or if they have, they spent a weekend at the Four Seasons meeting with senior executives from major companies or senior officials from the Chinese government… It was not reflecting what I was living on the ground in China…”

On official Chinese economic statistics:

“I was meeting with somebody who was a government official in China. This was before the crackdowns really started taking place and I was told story that… another government official in a local branch of this statistics bureau got busted for selling the real data. They were selling the real data to people. This was at a time period when the corruption crackdown was really just starting to take off. So, I asked this individual: ‘Did they get busted for corruption or national security?’ and they said ‘Oh, national security. We can’t have that information out in public.’ Just to have the confirmation that there was the real data and the fake data was eye opening from an official… We always think of censorship as going downwards to the people… but there is also enormous censorship upwards… Nobody tells their boss ‘Hey we had a bad year this year.’ …Yes there are absolutely two sets of books.”

For those keeping track, even the fake numbers now show that China’s growth rate is being eclipsed by India, which has dethroned China to become the world’s fastest growing large economy.