Evergrande and China’s energy crisis are two sides of one coin
China’s data on economic growth is man-made, and therefore unreliable.
That’s not the opinion of a provocateur, but the reported views of the country’s own Premier. During a dinner with U.S. ambassador Clark Randt in 2007, Li Keqiang — then party secretary of Liaoning province and a rising star in the Communist Party — said that official data on gross domestic product was less reliable than a mix of electricity consumption, rail cargo volumes, and loan growth. Those three figures were harder to fudge to produce a politically-convenient result, he said, according to a memo from the U.S. embassy released by Wikileaks in 2010.
