Gordon G. Chang: China's Car Sales Are a Fraud

If right-wingnut Glenn Beck needs a China hater on the tube, he usually calls Gordon G. Chang. Chang is always good for talking bad about China. In 2001, Gordon Chang published a book titled. “The Coming Collapse of China.” In it, he predicted that China would implode by 2006, if not earlier, due to the mass of non-performing loans in Chinese state banks. Much to the chagrin of Chang, China is still standing. It must give Chang heart palpitations that the Chinese economy grew more than three times since he penned his doomsday book. To add injury to irony, instead of a China syndrome caused by the meltdown of Chinese banks, a non-performing global financing firm called Lehman Brothers started a chain reaction in 2008 that brought the world financial system to the brink of nuclear winter.

China ranks as the world’s third largest economy since it passed by Germany in 2007. China is likely to overtake Japan to become the world’s second largest economy, either this year or by 2010. In the world of Gordon Chang, all this growth must be as real as a Gucci bag at China’s notorious fake markets.

Today, Chang wrote a piece in Forbes, titled “China’s 8.9 Percent Growth? No Way.” In it, Chang puts Chinese growth statistics to task. A country that should have collapsed by 2006, if not earlier, simply is not entitled to 8.9 percent GDP growth, Chang decides. And so, “it is unlikely that 3Q expansion was anywhere near the claimed 8.9 percent.” Chang thinks the number doesn’t jibe with other numbers. As a China expert, he should know that Chinese numbers never jibe, China simply can’t keep up with its 1.3b people, which most likely are 1.5b anyway. Chang could have simply claimed that the growth number is made up. But this would have made for a short column. And so Chang asks:” How can a country have robust consumer sales, nagging deflation and rapid monetary expansion all at the same time?” Chang comes to a simple, however unproven and unsourced explanation: “Vast quantities of consumer goods are now sitting in warehouses.”

And wait until Chang gets to car sales: “While optimistic analysts point to astounding car sales–up 70.5 percent in July, 94.7% in August and 83.6 percent in September,” Chang hears “yet unconfirmed” stories that “central government officials have ordered state enterprises to buy fleets of vehicles and that these businesses are storing them in parking lots across the country.” He can’t come up with proof for this assertion either. However, here is the smoking gun, Gordon Chang style: Gasoline sales are “up only 6.4% in August, for instance.” Chang is baffled: How can car sales go up 94.7 percent in August, when gasoline sales go only up by 6.4 percent?

We aren’t expecting Chang to come up with better numbers than the Chinese government. However, we can expect at least a baseline precision from the Forbes-brand capitalist tool.

China had some 168m motor vehicle registrations (all kinds that use gasoline) by the end of September of 2008. For the first nine months of the year, China’s vehicle sales increased 34.2 percent from some 7.2m sold in the first nine months of 2008 to 9.66m sold in the first nine months of this year. 9.66m additional cars on China’s streets, if we ignore the scrapping rate. China added 5.4 percent more cars to its car park. If gasoline consumption rose by “only 6.4 percent in August,” then that’s in line with the growth. I just got home from being stuck for two hours in murderous Beijing traffic. I can attest and certify that they do drive around a lot more than last year in a lot more cars than last year.

If his basic math skills are as bad as above, no wonder that Chang’s predictions never pan out. North Korea hasn’t attacked Japan either with nuclear rockets as predicted in Chang’s book “Nuclear Showdown.” And that’s a much simpler calculation than tracking cars.