It's odd to me that after so much proof in the past people in the West continue to take China's numbers at face value. I'm not here to start saying they are out

It's odd to me that after so much proof in the past people in the West continue to take China's numbers at face value. I'm not here to start saying they are out to trick people, but the culture around reporting is just different. It's like someone who just started their career not realizing that resumes are supposed to be a little "inflated" and you are supposed to talk yourself up a bit. People who see your resume are going to mentally knock it back down ~30% or so, everyone plays the game so if you write it without any kind of little embellishments, you are going to be undervalued. Same effect here, go to China and talk to Chinese people and see how many of them have strong faith in Chinese stocks, I haven't met a single one who would have the same confidence we have in US/EU company numbers (although the auditing system/industry and where it fails in the US could be a whole discussion on its own). Everyone there knows they are all adding a bit (or sometimes a lot) of hot air. It's not seen as fraud so much as it's just the way people do things. One concrete example to illustrate a behavior - they might simply take every single person in their R&D department from secretary and janitor on up and make them "R&D staff", it's an easy way to get free press and seem more advanced. We can read SEC reports or filings all we want, but you have to question where the numbers are coming from. The brand manager and company rep is the one telling us how many R&D staff they have (which conveniently lends credibility to their company) but there's no real oversight from any independent group on verifying those numbers. Summary - BYD cars are better than the biggest naysayers want you to think, but they are almost certainly not doing as well as they claim.