China will release key monthly activity figures this week. The news won’t be good, and anyone who isn’t hopelessly naive should anyway cast a wary eye at the data coming out of Beijing.

Frankly, I’m surprised Xi and the Party still keep a schedule for data dissemination. If things keep going the way they’re going on the economic front (poorly), I’d expect Xi to gradually pare the number of top-tier economic updates made available to market participants.

China has already curtailed overseas access to corporate information, E-commerce trends and satellite images on Wind, and according to anecdotal reports, local officials and businesspeople now dutifully parrot Xi quotables when speaking to foreign investors and executives. Foreign businesses operate under threat of “detentions and unexpected visits,” as the Wall Street Journal put it earlier this year, while international consulting firms are increasingly subject to police raids.

The number of articles about China’s economic woes published by US media outlets whose focus isn’t primarily macroeconomics or finance seems to be growing. “China’s Economic Miracle Is Turning Into A Long Slog,” The New Yorker declared this month. Foreign Affairs ran a nearly identical headline: “The End of China’s Economic Miracle.” And so on. Those are the types of stories that’d land you in jail in China. Xi would prefer they don’t run outside of China either, and one way to limit bad press would be to constrict the flow of data about the economy.

For now, Beijing is sticking to the usual monthly slate of releases, and the latest figures are grim. Exports and imports plunged in July and China has deflation both at the factory gate and at the consumer level, a perilous situation for a country some suggest is in the early stages of a balance sheet recession.

Credit data released late last week showed banks extended just CNY346 billion in new loans last month, the slowest pace of credit creation since 2009. Total financing was just CNY528 billion.

Note that the figures were disappointing even when correcting for the seasonal.

If demand for credit is that anemic, rate cuts won’t help. The PBoC eased in June, and banks cut rates in conjunction, but July’s credit figures suggest the fillip disappeared within weeks. M2 growth decelerated and the stock of total credit grew at the most tepid clip in at least half a decade.

New home sales by value for the largest property developers plunged by a third in July compared to the same month a year ago, and Country Garden may be the next Evergrande.

Regardless of what Tuesday’s update for retail sales, industrial output and fixed investment suggests about economic activity in China last month, the read-through from all of this is clear enough: The Party is staring at a crisis, and it can thank, in part anyway, Xi’s overwrought authoritarianism.

I’ve been over this and over it in these pages. Now, readers are hopefully starting to understand why I spent so much time over the past two years lamenting Xi’s metamorphosis from autocrat to totalitarian dictator. You can get along ok as an autocracy, and authoritarian states can persist (even thrive in some respects) in perpetuity, but totalitarianism won’t work.

Joe Biden, who’s keen to portray US-China competition as a (so far peaceful) struggle between democracy and autocracy, openly lampooned China’s struggles last week. His remarks were insult to injury in the context of US efforts to choke off investment. Biden called China’s economy a “ticking time bomb” while speaking at a fundraiser. He’s not wrong, although his numbers might’ve been. Biden mistakenly said China’s economy is expanding at a 2% clip.

Bloomberg, whose Hong Kong anchors in my opinion appear to go out of their way to avoid openly criticizing Xi, was quick to chastise Biden. The US president’s “off-script jabs undercut US-China ties,” one headline read. Biden’s famously gaffe-prone, so his 2% remark was doubtlessly a blunder, and he was also off by a couple hundred million people when he suggested China’s retirees outnumber the working age population. But then again, does Bloomberg actually know that China’s self-reported GDP figures are correct?

In any event, Biden should get his numbers right, not because veracity is the hallmark of effective political rhetoric (how many times did Donald Trump say something untrue about China?), but rather because the correct figures paint the same picture. One thing Biden got absolutely right, though, was his assessment of why economic collapse in China would be dangerous. “When bad folks have problems, they do bad things,” he said.