I’ve argued for years—sometimes to the amusement of experts, sometimes to their outrage—that China’s numbers are, at best, sketchy. At worst, they’re the stuff of campfire stories told by accountants who drink too much baijiu. Population means might, and Beijing knows it. But China’s once-glorious export markets are crumbling like damp plaster. The money-making engine that hauled the country out of whatever pre-industrial squalor it once endured is broken, sputtering, and leaking credibility in every direction. The world sees it—everyone except the few remaining zealots who’ve encased their heads in reinforced concrete to preserve the illusion.
The average person is slowly waking up to the fact that China is no longer a promise but a problem. And the only thing keeping the myth alive is the grand narrative of the “internal market”: 1.4 billion insatiable consumers supposedly ready to devour anything that isn’t welded to the floor. That fantasy alone is enough to make sales executives from Berlin to Timbuktu moisten their underwear in religious anticipation.
Now imagine the unthinkable: imagine those people simply aren’t there. Imagine the real population is half of what the glossy brochures insist. Watch how fast that would deflate even the most helium-pumped corporate bubble-head. Watch the commercial might of the Middle Kingdom shrivel like a cheap balloon left out in winter.And since the Party’s legitimacy depends on maintaining the illusion of unstoppable demographic and economic momentum… well, ask yourself: who honestly doubts the CCP would massage the figures? This isn’t a trick question.