American Propaganda Against China, Versus The Reality

Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)

The U.S. regime (including its ‘news’-media, think tanks, and other propaganda organs) is taking advantage of wars and global stresses that it had actually led in producing throughout the world, in order to focus on their harmful effects specifically upon China, as-if these were China-specific problems, instead of as reflecting harms that are being experienced in many, if not most, countries (and that were largely initiated by the U.S. Government itself).

Two recent examples of this anti-China propaganda are from NATO’s public relations agency, the Atlantic Council’s, 17 August 2023 article, “The Chinese economy’s moment of macro weakness — in charts”, and from the Rhodesist (or “neoconservtive”) Council on Foreign Relations’s (CFR’s) article, “The Root of China’s Growing Youth Unemployment Crisis”.

“The Chinese economy’s moment of macro weakness — in charts” says:

Here are five charts that illustrate China’s multidimensional moment of macroeconomic weakness:

1. Plunging property sales …

2. Manufacturing malaise …

3. Youth unemployment in select major economies [China, U.S. and EU] …

4. China’s deflationary dilemma …

5. China’s declining trade …

It concludes with “Revisiting China’s Macro Story”, which opens “While an extended downturn in any one of these indicators would be a cause for concern for economic policy makers in Zhongnanhai [China’s mini-version of The Kremlin], taken together they point to serious, structural issues within China’s economy that go well beyond the cyclical problem caused by COVID.”

“The Root of China’s Growing Youth Unemployment Crisis” opens:

China’s exports fell in August for the fourth month in a row, putting yet more pressure on its government to boost domestic consumption—something it has pledged, but thus far failed signally, to do.

Reviving a flagging economy is of great political importance for the Chinese Communist Party, not least because of the risk that the younger generation will question the legitimacy of a system that cannot meet its basic aspirations for gainful employment.  Yet the signs are that their prospects will continue to deteriorate.

The youth unemployment rate (for those aged 16 to 24) hit a record-high 21.3 percent in June, following which the government announced that it would no longer publish the statistic.  To juice the economy and create jobs, it is pulling the levers it knows best: home-buying incentives and infrastructure investment—the latter of which expected to total $1.8 trillion this year.

Unfortunately, the increasingly state-dominated property and construction sectors are not only notoriously unproductive, but virtually irrelevant to the prospects of the young and the educated.  Young Chinese look overwhelmingly to the service sector, which employs half the national workforce, for jobs.  And so new stimulus-driven opportunities in fields such as carpentry and bricklaying hold no interest for graduates in areas such as literature and computer science. …

The CFR is advocating for China to pump up youth-employment in “the service sector” (like in the United States: flipping hamburgers at McDonalds, and loading store-shelves and tending cash-registers at T.J.Maxx stores), instead of in, as they characterize it, “fields such as carpentry and bricklaying.”

By contrast with those two articles (presenting fake analyses of bogus or micharacterized options) is the 27 September 2023 article in the far-less-propagandistic scientific journal Nature, “How does digital transformation relieve the employment pressure in China? Empirical evidence from the national smart city pilot policy”, which opens with this:

Abstract

The impact of digital transformation on employment has been increasingly noticed by the academic community, while the internal mechanism still remains as a black box, especially in terms of specific pilot policy, such as the national smart city pilots policy in China. Based on the city-level and firm-level panel data, we investigate the impact of China’s national smart city pilot on the employment pressure of urban job seekers using difference-in-differences model. The results show that the national smart city pilots significantly reduces the employment pressure in the pilot cities. In addition, by bringing configuration optimization and technological upgrading, smart city pilots affect firm selection at the micro level, generating siphoning effects, factor substitution effects, and efficiency gains, and further affect the macro economy by promoting urban economic agglomeration, industrial structure transformation, and regional innovation thereby affecting employment pressure. Furthermore, the reduction effect of China’s national smart city pilot on employment pressure are heterogeneous in terms of cities, firms, and workers’ education levels. Finally, conclusions and policy implementations are provided to highlight the theoretical and practical values.

It says that,

We consider the smart city pilot policy [SCP] as a natural experiment and measure the average treatment effect of SCP on employment with time-varying DID [unfortunately not defined in this article, but that acronym refers to “the Difference-In-Difference methodology”] using panel data of Chinese cities and listed companies from 2003–2019, with pilot cities as the experimental group and non-pilot cities as the control group, to measure the average treatment effect of SCP on employment using difference-in-difference model (DID). …

Its “Conclusion” says:

The results show that the three batches of smart city pilots established from 2012–2014 significantly increased employment in pilot cities, resulting in a 7.43% increase in employment in pilot cities compared to non-pilot cities, alleviating the employment pressure of the pilot cities, and a 16.9% increase in employment in listed companies in pilot cities compared to non-pilot cities. Parallel trend tests showed no significant differences between the experimental and control groups before the pilots began, ruling out systematic differences, and placebo tests confirmed that the results were not coincidental, while a series of robustness tests were also passed.

As is, by now, amply clear from the relevant empirical data, China’s Government is vastly more focused on long-term success than are the Governments in the U.S. empire, and so the latter group of Governments have, ever since 1980, sunk so steeply in their economic performances as compared with all of the world’s Governments, and ESPECIALLY as compared with China’s Government, so that, as I headlined on 13 November 2023, “America and its allies are CLEARLY declining powers.” The long-term data make unequivically clear that ever since 1980, the Chinese Government has led its nation to spectacular economic success so that by around the year 2015, China became — and it now has clearly become — the world’s leading economy.

The U.S. regime’s constantly feeding propaganda instead of 100% truthful reporting and analysis to the public, is, in-and-of itself, just another example of its short-termism. It helps to predetermine its own continued, and continuing, failure, ever since 1980. This reality is displayed unequivocally, right there, in those numbers, which come from the World Bank.

All that the U.S. Government knows how to do is to deceive its public.

China is already the nation that leads the world in its human capital, and Russia is already the nation that leads the world in its physical capital. But in the U.S. and its colonies, such facts are hidden from the public, instead of being reported to the public.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.