I’m pretty unforgiving by now when it comes to face-value assessments of monthly macro releases out of Beijing.

It’s unfair — “inaccurate” is probably the better word, given that I don’t care a lot about being “fair” to an authoritarian who’d just as soon have me executed as look at me — to call the data “fake.” It’s not “fake” in the sense that Xi’s statisticians couldn’t show you the math (they could), nor is it “fake” in the sense that you can’t get from them the underlying figures used to calculate the aggregates and do the same math yourself (you could). Rather, it’s “fake” in the sense that it emanates from bureaucrats whose loyalty lies not with statistics, but with the communist dictatorship to which they swear an oath of fealty every day just by reporting to work, and really just by waking up in Mainland China.

If you knew I was committed to a certain editorial line, not because I’m opinionated, but rather because I worked for someone who would literally kill me for taking another line, would my analysis be “fake”? Not necessarily. And not strictly speaking. But it wouldn’t be trustworthy, would it? Same thing goes for China’s National Bureau of Statistics.

With that in mind, retail sales growth picked up smartly in October, according to Friday’s update from that same National Bureau of Statistics. The 4.8% jump was the best showing since February, and, you could argue, the only truly solid showing since then, assuming you buy the data.

Industrial output rose 5.3%. That was a miss, but not by a lot and markets are anyway far more concerned about retail sales given the read-across for an economy struggling desperately to revive domestic demand.

The NBS warned on an “increasingly complicated and severe external environment.” When you’re an autocracy, everything’s somebody else’s fault, never yours. That’s not to say China isn’t grappling with gale-force geopolitical headwinds, but Xi’s bellicosity and war posturing towards Taiwan isn’t helping in that regard, and his domestic policies are by now an abject failure. “Common prosperity” is producing precisely the opposite: Chinese have taken to calling Xi’s economy “garbage time,” only not too loudly, lest they should be shot in the mouth.

In the same statement, the NBS conceded that domestic demand’s “still weak” and the “foundation” for the recovery needs “reinforcing.” And yadda, yadda. It was the same spiel from last month, and the month before that and the month before that.

Friday’s data was predictably grim on the real estate front. Property investment was down 10.3% in the 10 months through October, and although analysts tried to find a silver lining in the slowest MoM new home price decline since March (a 0.5% drop), the YoY decline (nearly 6%) was the quickest in nine years and marked the 16th straight month during which prices were lower when measured against the same period a year ago.

Look, I could sit here and quote for you from a bunch of analyst commentary which all said more or less the same thing about this data on Friday. Or I could ask ChatGPT to “analyze” that analysis and write for me a summary of it. But what would be the point of that? You know the story: China says stimulus is working and the uptick in retail sales growth proves it, but the jury’s still out, the property market’s still in a rut and “Tariff Man”‘s coming for the trade surplus.

Further, the mood among households in China isn’t especially likely to improve sustainably because — and I’m sorry, really I am, particularly for the Chinese people — the country’s run by a certified Looney Tune who thinks he’s Mao Zedong. The fact that you’d be arrested and imprisoned for saying that — the Looney Tune part — in China or in Hong Kong, tells you everything you need to know about where that country’s headed.