Xi Jinping is limiting access to sensitive economic data, read one of two summary bullet points situated atop a Friday article inquiring after China’s youth unemployment rate.

For a second straight month, Beijing declined to publish the figures, saying only that employment among 16- to 24-year-olds “showed marked improvement in August.”

If that were the case, you’d think the government would be keen to quantify the scope of any such improvement. After all, investors are concerned, and their consternation only grew last month when the statistics bureau stopped reporting the numbers.

Leaving markets in the dark is arguably worse than conceding that youth joblessness is endemic, as the figures suggested prior to what’s now a two-month publication moratorium.

More than one in five Chinese youth was counted as unemployed in June, double the rate observed five years ago.

China’s government statisticians claim the figures are complicated, and that the NBS needs time to sort out the best way to measure the prevalence of youth joblessness. If you believe that, you probably believe the numbers China is still releasing are truthful and accurate too. And I have some prime real estate in the Donbas to sell you.

Mainstream financial media outlets aren’t in a position to state the obvious, or at least not in unequivocal terms, but thankfully, I labor under no such constraints: Xi was uncomfortable with the rising youth unemployment rate, and likely believed that publicizing it had the potential to fan discontent among China’s young adults. That’s a non-starter. So, he simply instructed the NBS to cease publication unless and until Beijing’s number crunchers can conjure a new methodology that produces a more favorable result.

That’s tantamount to lying. Of course, all governments lie all day, every day, and that penchant for dishonestly is hardly the sole purview of authoritarian regimes. But neither is malice the exclusive province of felons. Your otherwise upstanding neighbor could shoot your dog one day in a fit of suburban rage. Still, you’d be more concerned about leaving Lassie alone in the backyard if that neighbor’s resume includes more prison stints than PTA presidencies.

That gets to the heart of the issue in a world where virtue is entirely relative. It’s not about which is worse, Ukraine or Iraq, poisoning dissidents or droning innocents, Uyghur ethnocide or Native American genocide. It’s about who you can trust more in the normal course of day-to-day business. Beijing, Moscow and other autocratic regimes have a very large trust deficit in that regard, because such governments are engaged in an around-the-clock, all-consuming effort to ensure the populace remains pacified and the veneer of stability preserved. In the course of that effort, they do things that look paranoid, even bizarre, to outside observers — like abruptly ceasing to publish a statistical series on the flimsiest of excuses.

By Beijing’s own count, more than 10 million Chinese are graduating college this year. The economy is anemic. Xi, in his zeal to create “common prosperity,” has almost surely curtailed the number of available jobs in the tech sector. You don’t have to be a statistician to do this math. Youth joblessness is high. Sure, it might’ve improved in August, but the Party’s decision to stop publishing the numbers means nobody save the most credulous market participants will ever trust those figures again.

Given that, why should anyone believe that retail sales rose 4.6% in August, as Friday’s key activity figures suggested? That was better than estimates, and represented a marked pickup from July.

Industrial output was likewise better than expected, growing 4.5% YoY.

To be sure, I do believe those numbers are generally accurate. Not because I’m credulous, but because there isn’t anything outlandish about them, and they’re consistent with better trade figures and credit provision data from August (although that’s an exercise in question-begging given that the numbers all come from the same place).

The point isn’t to suggest that Xi is now just making it all up (although sometimes I do wonder if the official PMIs are made up, either literally or by virtue of respondents’ reluctance to speak truth to power), but rather to say that the veracity of the data should be openly questioned commensurate with China’s totalitarian turn.

On August 9, I wrote that, “For now, Xi’s still allowing the statistics bureau to publish economic data, but… figures suggesting the economy is succumbing could be considered state secrets sooner or later.” I went on: “Recep Tayyip Erdogan was widely suspected of intervening in the process of tabulating and reporting Turkey’s economic data last year, and Xi is twice the authoritarian, at least.” Fast forward a mere six weeks and there’s a de facto moratorium on a key statistical series in Beijing.

Bloomberg on Friday noted that over the past year, Xi has “limited access to corporate data, court documents, academic journals and raided expert networks serving businesses, hampering investors’ ability to assess the economy.” At some point, it’ll be incumbent upon media outlets and investors to state the unvarnished truth: Xi’s China is an out-and-out Communist dictatorship which, in terms of governance, has much more in common with Kim’s North Korea than it does with the rest of the world. Why anyone would ever invest there is a mystery to me.