Ignore the good number, focus on the bad number. Pick any indicator that works for the story you're telling. Liberal economics is not science it's storytelling.
The NYT article says:
Economic output climbed 4 percent in the last quarter of 2021, slowing from the previous quarter. Growth has faltered as home buyers and consumers become cautious.
Over all of last year, China’s economic output was 8.1 percent higher than in 2020, the government said. But much of the growth was in the first half of last year.
So they're literally just fucking fishing for numbers to be like "We aren't technically lying, we were just considering these 3 months instead of the whole year!"
The snapshot of China’s economy, the main locomotive of global growth in the last few years, adds to expectations that the broader world economic outlook is beginning to dim. Making matters worse, the Omicron variant of the coronavirus is now starting to spread in China, leading to more restrictions around the country and raising fears of renewed disruption of supply chains.
Yeah, the only thing to be concerned about with Omicron is that fewer treats might be made, right?
As costs for many raw materials have risen and the pandemic has prompted some consumers to stay home, millions of private businesses have crumbled, most of them small and family-owned.
Basically the same thing happened all over the world, but China has a million fewer dead people than America. Weird.
Mr. Kang was stuck paying high rent for his store despite the pandemic. He finally closed it in June. “We can hardly survive,” he said.
"Hardly surviving" is a hell of a lot better than what those dead Americans are doing.
The building and fitting out of new homes has represented a quarter of China’s economy. Heavy lending and widespread speculation have helped the country erect the equivalent of 140 square feet of new housing for every urban resident in the past two decades. This autumn, the sector faltered. The government wants to limit speculation and deflate a bubble that had made new homes unaffordable for young families.
can you fucking imagine any western country doing this to help its people lmao
Like, I don't necessarily doubt that China's economy might slow down a bit, but the point is that it's for a greater purpose, to help its citizens. The article treats the economic growth as if it's God here and that a slowdown is seen as automatically troubling or something, even if it's done for a good reason or a reason that will prevent future economic meltdowns, like deflating bubbles. American journalists and most economists are completely unable to think on a timescale longer than a quarter, maybe a year maximum, and especially unable to conceive of a society where the economy is used, or at least now is geared towards being used, to the benefit of the people and not the magic money line.
Maybe the rate at which it's rate of growth is increasing is lower? Economists love stupid shit like that, where it doesn't matter how big something is, it doesn't matter how fast it grew, no what's important is the rate at which the rate of growth is changing, that's definitely the most real metric.
Or they're grasping at some other metric, like percentage of total production exported to the US.
Or they're just lying outright, since it's not like opeds have to adhere to material reality.
