This is not at all true about the Chinese economy. The Chinese economy is tightly integrated into the world economy, and there are many ways to check their numb

This is not at all true about the Chinese economy. The Chinese economy is tightly integrated into the world economy, and there are many ways to check their numbers. For every widget they export, there is a foreign importer. For everything they import, there is a foreign exporter. There are foreign companies that are heavily invested in most sectors of the Chinese economy. The idea that China is a black box that no information comes out of is just horribly out of date. This isn't the Mao era of a sealed-off China. This is the era of international China. The government itself does not like fake numbers, because they render economic policy ineffective. Beijing needs to know what is going on in the provinces. Generating fake numbers for public consumption and then a private set of real numbers would be a monumental undertaking that would be impossible to pull off over the long term for a country with as large and complex an economy as China's. Provinces have tried to fudge numbers in the past, and Beijing has punished them when it found out, because doing so goes against the interests of the central government.