Chinese macro releases are a bit of a rabbit hole. Beijing leaves a lot to the imagination, and macro watchers are an imaginative bunch.

As ever, it’s important to emphasize that the data isn’t “made up.” That’s a canard. A funny canard at the heart of which sits a kernel of truth. But a canard all the same. You can go to the NBS’s website and download most of the figures used to tally the aggregates and generally speaking, it’s all going to add up.

That said, I get the chuckles a little bit watching macro observers torture the numbers. I assiduously avoid social media with one exception: I like to peruse the debate on days when Beijing releases top-tier data.

There’s a cottage industry in parsing those figures, and the people involved exhibit something that looks a lot like pedantic obsession, an assessment I’m qualified to make as an obsessive pedant myself. These are economists, strategists of various sorts, stay-at-home “fund managers” and even some former government officials who found their way into macro-focused roles in the private sector.

They all have one thing in common when it comes to China: They haven’t truly come to terms with the reality of Xi Jinping as a totalitarian dictator. China didn’t sign any binding treaties that obligate the NBS to release accurate economic data. Or any economic data at all, for that matter. If the data’s out there, it’s because Xi’s ok with it, and that fact alone renders the numbers meaningless in some sense. Simply put: I’m not interested in data that’s published at the pleasure of dictator.

Most (and probably all) of the folks who pore over the numbers every month would say that’s a ridiculous exaggeration. To which I’d respond: What happened to the official, NBS youth unemployment series? It’d be a rhetorical question. What happened is that Xi simply instructed the NBS to stop publishing it when it rose high enough to reflect poorly on the regime.

Plainly, the bar for major releases (e.g., CPI, retail sales, trade figures and so on) to be nixed is so high as to be scarcely worth mentioning. That is: The macro (or, more to the point probably, the geopolitical) conditions under which Xi would institute a blackout for major Chinese economic aggregates would be so dire that we’d all have bigger problems than the moribund consumption impulse in China (for example).

My point is just that Xi’s a lost cause by now. Much as everyone wants (and in some respects needs) to pretend otherwise, China’s more than an autocracy. It’s an out-and-out dictatorship. A totalitarian regime that operates under one-man rule. There will come a day when everyone’s compelled to confront that reality head on. Xi’s strong-arm tactics to crush Hong Kong’s democracy were a prelude. The writing’s on the wall, but the finance/macro community either can’t read it or doesn’t want to.

Anyway, that’s the lens through which I view top-tier data out of China. CPI and PPI data, released over the weekend, showed consumer prices rose 0.3% YoY last month. That was quicker than the 0.2% consensus expected.

As a reminder: Quicker’s better in China. Xi’s struggling to keep the country out of deflation, consumer sentiment’s abysmal (having never recovered from the pandemic lockdowns) and there’s scant evidence to suggest a turnaround’s imminent. Producer prices spent a 19th month in deflation.

An update on retail sales (covering April) is due this week. Regardless of what it shows, the Chinese consumer’s in poor spirits. It’s not just leftover bad vibes from Xi’s draconian COVID policies. The legacy of the property crackdown is both a psychological and financial albatross, and on and on.

Apparently, even the minuscule uptick in CPI is a false optic. Some (many) local governments are raising prices for utilities and public transportation, putting upward pressure on the CPI gauge. To the extent those price hikes “leave households with less spending power for other purchases,” as Bloomberg put it, the irony is that far from telegraphing a nascent recovery in domestic demand, CPI upturns could presage the opposite.

Meanwhile, exports managed to post a gain in trade data covering April, rising 1.5%. Caveats were myriad, as usual.

The same collection of China watchers mentioned above engages monthly in a contest to discover the key takeaway from the trade figures. Rarely, if ever, is there any agreement on what that takeaway actually is. There’s always a distortion. Some seasonal everyone else is missing. Some holiday effect that needs accounting for. A comp to consider. An anomalous surge in excavator shipments. Something to do with rare earths. And as you’ve probably noticed, everyone’s an expert Chinese EVs these days.

The same figures showed imports rose 8.4% last month. Maybe that’s indicative of an upturn in domestic demand. Or maybe not. Maybe it just reflected computer parts, as one analyst noted.

The best case for scrutinizing the data — and particularly the export figures — says the releases can help market participants map the topography of trade policy. I won’t argue that.

The Biden administration’s poised to unveil new tariffs on “strategic” sectors of the Chinese economy — including EVs, batteries and solar panels — this week. The actual impact of the levies is expected to be small, but the signaling effect, particularly as it relates to Europe’s deliberations around Chinese EVs, could me meaningful. And the White House is doubtlessly keen to bolster its “tough on China” credentials ahead of the general election sprint, during which Donald Trump will surely scapegoat Beijing for anything and everything that ails blue collar America.

China will characterize any new measures as an egregious affront. Indeed, they already have. “Rather than correct its wrong practices, the US continues to politicize trade,” a Party functionary said late last week, at a daily press conference. Additional tariffs would be “insult to injury,” the same spokesperson warned.