What I have been able to do is look at the original survey, and this is what I found:
The number of businesses who responded to the survey was 160. The numbers who actually said they might face closure in 2008 if business did not improve were 2 (as in two) in the first half of the year, and 3 (that's three) in the second half of the year. That makes five.
And that's about it folks. As best I can ascertain, the stories filling the press about how thousands of HK-based businesses will close this year appear to be based on a sample of one hundredth of one percent of them, who said they might, back in March.
The best analogy I can find for this is as follows: I conduct a survey among 160 people. I establish that 5 of them "might get a bit annoyed with the mother-in-law if she makes a nuisance of herself at Christmas". I produce a news story: "Christmas carnage! Ten thousand mothers-in-law to be slaughtered!"
The Newsweek link provided an even more interesting trail. While following up on it, I uncovered two other relevant quotes, both of which John later said he had seen. Here they are together:
John Lee (The Guardian – 8th December):
"For example, 10,000 factories have already been closed in the Pearl River delta area, which includes Shenzhen – the iconic region representing a booming China..."
Joshua Kurlaznick (The New Republic – 18th November):
"And the global financial slowdown is already taking a terrible toll. Some 10,000 factories in southern China's Pearl River Delta area had closed by the summer of 2008..."
Gordon Chang (Forbes Magazine – 24th October):
"Declining U.S. consumer sentiment has led to this year's closure of 10,000 factories in China's export powerhouse, the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong province..."
Notice anything, anybody?
This is the original quote from the Newsweek article:
George Wehrfritz (Newsweek – July 7-14)
On June 2, the influential Taiwan magazine Business Weekly ran a cover story headlined THE EXODUS OF TAIWAN BUSINESSES, which claimed that 10,000 factories, some of them with a two-decade history in the area, have already fled the delta in favor of Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh or Indonesia.
Alone, I suspect, among all those who have taken an interest in the subject, I took the trouble to track down the Business Weekly article. Far from the pithy, hard-headed business analysis implied by Newsweek, it is in fact a seven-page human interest story about the tribulations of a Taiwanese family who lost their business in Guangdong.
The reference to 10,000 factory closures is limited to one single sentence in the article, and it does not even come from the author of the Taiwanese article – it was itself lifted from a mainland Chinese newspaper. As the figure is essentially peripheral to the "real" story, there is no indication that the Business Weekly writer made any attempt to verify it or subject it to any kind of analysis, or even try to track down any original source.
It is worth mentioning in passing that Gordon Chang is one of the world's leading China pessimists, while The New Republic has a quite outstanding track record of allowing itself to be successfully duped by some of the most spectacularly extravagant liars in journalistic history.
Meanwhile, I leave you with this as an example of The Guardian's editorial standards. It is John Lee's answer to me when I asked him if he stood by the numbers in his article: "For my part, I am happy to stand by the figures as a good estimation given the prevalence with which they have been quoted by many reputable publications..."
And that pretty much sums up western media reporting of Chinese issues, as typified by The Guardian: See a factoid. If it's bad, it's good. Repeat it. Now it's a fact.
