- Belated Broadcasting Corporation AGAIN! - 30th January 2025
- Your number’s up! - 29th January 2025
- Secrets and lies part two - 28th January 2025
During 23 years with the BBC, and a 41 year journalistic career (when he was trained to use clear and simple language, avoiding jargon), for our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry number crunching has often been essential, but a lot of ‘official’ statistics cannot now be relied on.
For me it’s difficult enough doing maths, but when you can’t even rely on the ‘official’ figures, what hope do I have?
Normally you can trust the numbers which come out of UK bodies, like the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the Office for National Statistics (ONS), Welsh Government (WG), or UK Government departments, but that’s not the case in other countries around the world.
Let’s take the example of China and its National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).
On January 17 the NBS reported that China’s economy grew by exactly five per cent in 2024.
The lovely round number was bigger than expected, but precisely in line with the official growth target.
China’s economy managed this extraordinary feat despite an ongoing property slump, dismal consumer morale and demographic decline: the population shrank by almost 1.4 million last year.
The Chinese Government is likely to approve a similar growth target for 2025 when its rubber-stamp legislature gathers in March.
Working out whether China has met or not met its extremely dubious targets to secure self-sufficiency in key areas of manufacturing, is highly-questionable because it relies on official statistics like these.
The details of Made in China 2025 are laid out in hundreds of official documents.
A so-called ‘Green Book’, published by a committee of China’s top engineers, identified targets for Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Government largesse.
10 sectors, ranging from information technology to aerospace, were chosen, and within these, hundreds of industries were designated for support in the form of direct subsidies, cheap credit and inexpensive land.
The plan laid out dozens of statistical benchmarks, and it looks to all the world as though China has exceeded most of these.
But many economists doubt the figures, and some, for example, believe China’s official growth figures have become severed from reality, one of whom is Gao Shanwen of SDIC Securities
Mr Shanwen has declared: “My own speculation is that in the past two to three years, the real (growth) number on average might be around 2 per cent even though the official number is close to five per cent”.
His comments upset China’s leaders, who do not want scepticism about their statistics to undermine confidence in the economy’s recovery.
Mr Gao’s WeChat social-media account was blocked and, according to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), he has been banned from public speaking.
This seems to me a classic case of shooting the messenger, or perhaps it is the little boy who said the emperor has no clothes.
Not sure, and I’ve probably mixed my metaphors there!
What is clear, though, is that Mr Gao was only saying out loud what a lot of people were thinking about China’s statistics.
Perhaps the little boy who pointed out the emperor had no clothes, had an ABACUS!
The memories of Phil’s astonishing, decades long award-winning career in journalism (when numbers were often crucial so always had to be checked) as he was gripped by the rare neurological disabling condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A Good Story’. Order it now.
Tomorrow – why unwelcome headlines about a BBC Wales star being recorded making a sexist remark, throws the spotlight once again on controversy about the huge corporation’s Press Office refusing to respond to a query sent before Christmas, on how many programmes could not now be shown…