As a general rule, when I read a statement prefaced by a comment like Hong's, my mind automatically transliterates it into something like "My fellow wine-bar guffaws and I are of the view that..."
However, in this case I can be a little more scientific. Let us suppose that there are around 50,000 "observers" and that of these around 160 have had their views canvassed. Let us further suppose that of the hundred and sixty, five happen to have expressed a view that coincides with The Guardian editorial line. In such a case, it would indeed be natural for The Guardian to conclude that "most observers" were of this view.
How am I able to be so precise on this? To answer the question, one must pass on to the next of CiF's China articles this week, How China Bought its Graduates' Loyalty, by John Lee.
The gist of the article is that the graduate population of China is a simmering cauldron of resentment, which could tip either way in the coming months. The CCP lives in fear...
It has the obligatory and gratuitous references to Tiananmen and "gulags". It then becomes irritating. This statement: "Worryingly, China's growth has been revised down to around 7-8%, down from 12% just six months ago, in spite of a recently announced US$600bn stimulus..." contains a subliminal message: "The package has failed! The package has failed!" that appears deliberately to ignore the fact that the package was in fact announced in response to the forecasts of falling growth, not followed by them.
But John is not finished with the package: "The details of it were vague," he tells us, "even by Beijing's standards."
It is hard to know what to make of this. The truth is that the package does in fact cover ten specific areas in considerable detail. Anyone who is interested can find them discussed here in summary, and if you really want to dig into the detail you can follow the links or do a little research. I don't know what more any reasonable person would expect of a sensible government at this stage of the downturn.
I'm left to the conclusion that the only article John has bothered to read on the subject is the one to which he links by his Guardian colleague Tania Branningan, which, it is true, is long on gleeful hand-rubbing at how bad things are, and fails to make any mention whatsoever of the ten-point detail of the package.
As well as offering opinions, John's article is peppered with frightening factoids and figurines. Unfortunately, I have not been able to examine all of them. The main reason for this is that the very first one that I addressed immediately collapsed in disarray and ran off to hide under the bed. The one I chose was a categorical statement that ten thousand factories have already closed in the Pearl River Delta this year, offered by John without any qualification.
I wrote to John to ask him for the source of this information, and to be fair to him he did at least have the courtesy to reply to me. He cited two sources, an article in Newsweek in July and one from China Daily in April.
The article in China Daily claimed that 10,000 factories might close (NB not "have closed") in the Pearl River Delta in 2008, and was largely based on a survey conducted in March 2008 by a group called the Chinese Manufacturers' Association of Hong Kong (CMA) that suggested that 12 percent of Hong Kong-based businesses were considering closing.
I suspect that the attribution of the survey to CMA may be a journalist's error, for two reasons. The first is that I can find no trace of the survey on the CMA website, or any reference to it that does not seem to come from the China Daily article. I have written to them to ask for clarification, but as yet I have no reply. The second is that I know that a similar body to CMA, the Federation of Hong Kong Industries (FHKI), did indeed issue the results of such a survey in March 2008, whose numbers and information closely resemble those in the China Daily story. The FHKI survey has been extensively used elsewhere as a source of stories that thousands of HK-based businesses were likely to close this year – for example here .
I have not been able to track the FHKI story back to its original source. It seems to have been subject to considerable cross-fertilization. The figures reported for HK-based business in Pearl River are variously forty, fifty, sixty, or seventy thousand, and the percentage of expected closures varies around 10, 12 and 15.
