KEEPING up-to-date with China’s economic development and its trade ties with the rest of the world can be easy or complicated, depending on the source.

Unfortunately, many citizens in different parts of the world depend on supposedly ‘independent’ accounts by giant modern global juggernauts of the so-called ‘Mainstream’ and Social Media that claim to offer analyses and predictions based more on wishes than actual facts, commentaries and conclusions always tending to differ with what the Western media likes to describe as ‘communist-party controlled propaganda’.

During COVID, the rest of the world was too busy battling the pandemic and blindly blaming China, but immediately after, the ever-rising costs of the Ukraine War and the continuing supply chain foul-ups that jacked-up prices started biting home as the chickens came to roost across Europe and North America, in particular.

Those fanning the flames of war in Europe from near and far conspired to block the only peace plan on the table, tabled by Beijing and supported by both Kyiv and Moscow.

All other efforts at brokering peace were killed on arrival, until the African Union (AU) dispatched seven leaders, led by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, to visit both fighting nations and work on offering a new peace plan.

US-China ties recently exploded over the shooting of an alleged ‘spy balloon’ by the US military and insensitive comments by Washington’s political dynasties.

Post-COVID economic recovery in China has been described by the Western media as everything from ‘slow’ to ‘reversing’ to ‘static’ and ‘unmoved’, even its annual positive growth rates ignored, upstaged or downplayed by the media from competing economies in the Group of Seven (G-7), the richest nations on earth.

They love to refer to the fact that China no longer boasts double-digit growth rates, but refuse to admit that even the lower growth rates are in the black (plus) positive bracket while other global economies are mainly in the negative red (minus) bracket.

Just last week, Bloomberg, CNN and BBC economic reports started highlighting ‘growing unemployment’ in China, without also acknowledging the PRC is still the most advanced member state of the UN with the lowest poverty rate and the highest contributor to aid for developing nations, while also leading in implementation of the UN’s Special development Goals (SDGs).

But all that adds-up to naught (zero) when one sees the real facts and figures — from China – that simply cannot be challenged, far less changed.
Take the latest figures I got online from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), on Monday.

It said: “China’s GDP grew by 5.5 per cent year-on-year in the first half of the year to 59.3 trillion yuan ($8.3 trillion), posting a steady economic rebound.”

In the second quarter, it added, “The economy rose by 6.3 per cent compared with a year earlier, up from 4.5 per cent in the first quarter of the year.”

The NBS further reported: “On a quarter-on-quarter basis, China’s GDP increased by 0.8 per cent in the second quarter of the year.”

The figures also showed:
China’s value-added industrial output — a gauge of activity in the manufacturing, mining and utilities sectors — grew by 4.4 per cent in June from a year earlier, after a 3.5 per cent rise in May;
In the first half of 2023, value-added industrial output “grew by 3.8 per cent compared to the same period last year, while in the first quarter, it rose by three per cent from 2021…”
And retail sales — a key measurement of consumer spending – “grew by 3.1 per cent year-on-year in June, down from the 12.7 per cent growth in May.”

In the first half of the 2023, retail sales also “rose by 8.2 per cent compared to the same period in 2022, while in the first quarter, they grew by 5.8 per cent from 2021.”

In the January-June 2023 period, fixed-asset investment — a gauge of expenditures on items including infrastructure, property, machinery and equipment – “grew by 3.8 per cent, compared with 2022, while in the January-May period, it jumped four per cent year-on-year.”

The urban jobless rate came in at 5.2 per cent in June, flat with the previous month, according to the NBS.

But despite the steady recovery, the NBS warned of “pressures from a complicated international environment,” saying that “the foundation for the economic rebound is not yet solid.”
The NBS also advised that “More efforts should be made to promote high-quality growth, fully deepen reforms and opening-up, accelerate the modernisation of the industrial system, improve the economic structure and gather new growth momentum.”

Unbelievable to those already rendered brain-dead by the global anti-China propaganda lobby but undoubtedly true, these figures expose the lies, half-truths and basic concoctions served-up daily by correspondents in Beijing, Hong Kong and Taipei.

China and the USA share the world’s two biggest economies and while China doesn’t ever lay claim to be the better manager of macro home economics, its growth, since the Deng Xiaoping era in the 1980s, has shown the entire world that Beijing has always done a better job, with China’s planned economy forever expanding while central authorities plan ahead for both the expected and unpredictable.

In four decades, the PRC has so better understood the working of the global capitalist economy that Beijing has been consistently able to keep the US in line on bilateral trade and investment matters — to the extent that US corporate businesses based in China annually plead with Washington to play its cards with Beijing in ways that won’t harm their profitable business interests.
But that type of news you’ll only get if you have reason to doubt the permanent preachers of doom and gloom for everything involving China.

Meanwhile, having reduced poverty to near total eradication (by UN standards) and set the stage for advancing towards a China under Socialism with Chinese Characteristics by the Centenary of the Republic in 1949, the PRC continues rolling out long-term plans for the next quarter century of the still-new millennium.