I'm not claiming that the CCP leaders are faking these statistics on purpose.

I'm claiming that there are people all up and down the Chinese chain of command and the industrial supply lines that siphon off value and fudge the numbers, for their personal gain. This accumulates over time, so that the statistics that the CCP depends on _for their own decisions_, are full of noise. That is how they end up building entire towns for people that have not been born, and then the towns stay empty and the real estate investors go bankrupt.

Central planning — and the nonsense statistics it depends on — are inherently inefficient and ineffective. There is no transparency. There are no watchdogs. There are no investigative journalists or oppositional critics. There are no real elections, where a fresh set of people take a look at the books. Every once in a while, there is a demonstrative purge, to calm the public, and then it's quickly back to normal.

Garbage in. Garbage out. From top to bottom. From coast to coast.

They might as well have the Minnesota Democratic Party run their country.