The Globe and Mail

    BEIJING – There was almost a fist-fight among the Chinese and foreign journalists who scrambled for copies of China's latest economic data when the information was released at a press conference in Beijing this week.

        Stacks of paper flew wildly in the air as dozens of journalists fought for copies of the third-quarter numbers on China's economic growth. Everyone was rushing off to file the new statistics to their newspapers or websites.

        It was another small sign of how crucial China has become to the world economy these days. If you want to know the fate of the global economy, you have to understand what's happening in China. It moves markets, shifts the flow of trade, shapes the level of retail prices, and influences the survival of multi-national corporations.

        Too bad, then, that the Chinese government engages in such heavy spin in its economic data. There are plenty of debates on the accuracy of Chinese statistics, and I won't summarize those here. I'm more interested in how the latest numbers were spun by the supposedly neutral National Bureau of Statistics, which compiles and releases the data.

        At the press conference this week, bureau spokesman Li Xiaochao spent most of his time proclaiming that China was a victim of external forces – natural disasters, heavy snowfall, and the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis. “The difficulties and challenges that we experienced this year were unprecedented,” he told the press conference.

        Mr. Li heaped praise on his bosses, saying that the government has responded “with calm” and had adopted measures that “ensured steady and fast growth.” Those measures “will work in due time,” he said.

        To hear Mr. Li tell the story, China's government policies are brilliantly intelligent, with no room for improvement. “The overall situation is sound,” he said.

        Hearing him speak, you would never guess that China's growth has tumbled to its lowest level since the SARS epidemic of 2003.

       He even suggested that the global crisis would be good for China, resulting in a “better industrial structure.” He noted a drop of 6.2 percentage points in the growth rate of “large energy consuming industries” this year, coupled with an impressive 16.5-per-cent growth rate in high-tech industries.

       But a careful listener might wonder about this boast. If the industrial structure needs such a drastic restructuring, wasn't there some problem in China's growth model? Isn't it possible that China was depending too heavily on its export-oriented smokestack industries? Wasn't this the essential weakness of the Chinese model – its reliance on heavily polluting factories to make cheap goods for export to Western markets, at the expense of the environment and China's own domestic consumers?