Xi Jinping’s foreign policy centerpiece – Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – has been failing/slowing for so long now that China ‘has stopped publishing tens of thousands of economic statistics’, i.e., China’s Economic Statistics are ‘Going Dark’. ‘Going Dark’ is a good indicator of failure:

• 1) The Daily Chart: Breaking China
• 2) The Rise and Fall of the BRI
• 3) China’s Belt and Road to Nowhere
• 4) ‘In a lot of the world, the clock has hit midnight’: China is calling in loans to dozens of countries from Pakistan to Kenya
• 5) China’s economy loses momentum in second quarter

Conclusion

The Financial Times article – China’s GDP blackout isn’t fooling anyone – summed it up back on October 21 2022:

There is diminishing faith in the few economic indicators that, after years of obfuscation, still see the light of day…

If you had paid a visit to China’s National Bureau of Statistics in the days following Xi Jinping’s election as general secretary of the Chinese Communist party in 2012, you would have found a cornucopia of economic data.

Skip to 2016, and more than half of all indicators published by the national and municipal statistics bureaus had been quietly discontinued. The disappearances have been truly remarkable.

The blackout is just one of many signals that whatever number does finally emerge is unlikely to be high — and it may be treated with scepticism in any case.