China is doing everything it can to conceal the true extent of its economic turmoil

The final release for the data series - July's number - came in at a record high of 20.5%. The number had become a global shorthand for China's inability to reignite its economy since President Xi Jinping ended the country's draconian COVID-19 lockdowns. This is happening because Xi's China is one that puts ideology before economic growth. Not because the reforms weren't working, but because the China they were creating is not the one Xi wants to see. The struggles that China faces are real - economic pain, foreign-investor concerns, crumbling demographics - but in the face of these challenges, it's clear that Xi will not bend on his vision for the sake of the country. Based on the discrepancy, it's becoming clear that China is overstating how much stuff it's shipping abroad. Chu said she now uses a blend of the two datasets, and based on that average she estimates that China's 2023 exports will fall 8% compared to 2022. Sometime in the past few months, Wall Street went from expecting that China would experience a glorious bounce back from COVID to panicking about an all-out economic collapse. Victor Shih, an associate professor and the director of the 21st Century China Center at University of California San Diego, told me that it would take payments totaling 10% to 20% of China's GDP to spur the kind of consumption necessary to pull China out of the doldrums the state steered it into.