China asks bloggers to stop badmouthing the economy

The guidance from one of China’s most popular social media sites comes as the country’s top leaders seek to restore confidence, including by pledging to strengthen fiscal growth.

In a Politburo meeting last week, top officials from the ruling Communist Party vowed to strengthen public opinion guidance on economic affairs. Mixed economic data on Friday showed that recovery after the pandemic remained slow, with weak consumer confidence and a lingering real estate crisis.

The Ministry of State Security said on Friday that negative comments on the economy would endanger national security. “Various clichés intended to undermine China’s economy have appeared consistently, in an attempt to use false narratives to construct a ‘discourse trap’ and ‘cognitive trap’ that China is in decline,” the ministry said in a post on its official WeChat account. “This is an attempt to strategically contain and suppress China.”

China’s economy grew at a 5.2 per cent pace in the first three quarters of the year and showed signs of improvement in November, with factory output and retail sales rising, the government said on Friday.

But investments in property sank 9.4 per cent, the National Bureau of Statistics said, indicating the real estate sector has yet to recover from a crisis that has led dozens of developers to default on hundreds of billions of dollars in debts.

The world’s second-largest economy is still contending from the setbacks of the COVID-19 pandemic, among other shocks, dogged by weakness in the property sector and in global demand for China’s exports, high debt levels and wavering consumer confidence.

The 10.1 per cent jump in retail sales in November from a year earlier, up from a 7.6 per cent jump in October, showed a glimmer of hope given that sluggish consumer spending has been a key factor hindering a stronger recovery.

But it’s unclear if it will be sustained. A survey of factory purchasing managers, called the purchasing manager index, or PMI, showed a slightly bigger contraction in factory activity compared with October, a fact that statistics bureau spokesperson Liu Aihua said was partly because some industries were entering their usual off season after holiday production rushes.

But Mr Liu added that “at the same time there is insufficient market demand”.

“Looking to the future, the internal and external environment facing our country’s development is still complex and severe,” Mr Liu said. “To further promote economic recovery, we need to overcome some difficulties and challenges.”

China’s economy has the advantages of a vast market of 1.4 billion people and an advanced industrial base, he said.

Pockets of strength have kept the economy growing at a pace matching the government’s target for about 5 per cent growth this year, helped by robust exports of industrial machinery, mobile phones and vehicles.

Factory output rose 6.6 per cent in November compared with a year earlier, the statistics bureau reported. That was the strongest growth since September 2022.

Bloomberg and AP