I didn’t say that. I am too much of a conservative when it comes to economic figures from China. That’s why I have only ever warned our readers to take Chinese statistics with “a grain of salt”. It turns out that I am wrong, and very wrong indeed, according to China’s top economist. Zhou Tianyong 周天勇, a researcher at the central school of the communist party in Beijing, warns that the government must “not fool itself” that urban unemployment is at 4%. The actual figure, he estimates, can be as high as 12%. The discrepancy comes from the existing accounting procedure willfully ignoring the number of migrant workers who lose their jobs as a result of the global financial meltdown. Read the rest of this entry »
