US' fake narrative about Chinese economy misleading

China's economy has outperformed other major economy in the past four years - in most cases by a huge margin. However, the US has launched an all-out effort of disseminating propaganda to hide this reality, said John Ross, former director of economic and business policy for the mayor of London, in an interview with China Daily.

What are the motives behind the spread of the "China in decline" argument? Ross said there are two motives. The subjective one is that the US wants to dissuade foreign companies from investing in China because China is an extremely attractive market. It wants to perhaps create some demoralization in China by breeding such false stories to change people's ideas.

The objective one is the US wants to try to get China to adopt the wrong political and economic policies, he added.

How did the US create such a narrative? Ross noted that one is straightforward: telling things that are not true, either through fake news or claims that the US economy is outperforming China. The other one is what is rightly characterized as a dirty business in statistics, which is that you take one tiny aspect of a situation and blow it out of all proportion.

"There are bound to be individual indicators in individual quarters or individual months in which China is not the best-performing economy in the world," Ross said.

"So what I was trying to do was to lay out the situation absolutely systematically and I'd made a comparison therefore to every major country in the world, both advanced economies and developing countries, and showed that China is so outperforming them," he added.