95% of China’s GDP Fake, $10K Per Capita Lie — Xi’s Secret Probe Finds Economy Dead

We don't have much time left. The economic situation is getting worse, and money is getting harder to earn. 2026 feels really tough. I wonder how it is for you all. Life is really hard for ordinary people in China. The past couple of years have been very tough, especially this year. It feels like no one has any money. Let's all share. How frugal have you become? I haven't bought any clothes in two years. Despite strict controls, videos showing the struggles of everyday life have continued to appear online in China over the past two years. Meanwhile, officials keep promoting a positive narrative. On May 18, party officials held a press conference on April's economic performance. A spokesperson claimed that China's economy is in a rapid consumption upgrade phase, with per capita GDP exceeding 100,000 US dollars. The remarks sparked ridicule online. One user wrote, Sorry, dragging the country down. Another asked, Where do we collect this money? Someone joked, Work another year and buy a Tesla outright next year. A Chinese scholar told foreign media, Per capita GDP is a macroeconomic indicator, not a measure of household income, and it cannot directly reflect real living standards. Linking per capita GDP to consumption upgrades is just public. This is their usual sleight of hand. I don't even watch the news anymore. There's not a single honest statement. For years, party officials have repeatedly mentioned that per capita GDP exceeds 100,000 US dollars, with references going back to around 2020 or even earlier. Officials also claimed that household consumption is improving, shifting from basic to higher quality and development-oriented spending, and that living standards are rising. Yet in reality, discussions about restaurant closures, shopping mall shutdowns, and consumption downgrade have become hot topics online. Negative posts, however, increasingly face account bans and censorship. It's all over. The entire street has shut down. This is near Xiangyang People's Square, prime real estate. Look at this. Everything's closed. For rent, for rent, shopfronts for rent. Across the street, prices are dropping. Leases ending. Physical stores are really struggling right now. Is Suzhou's economy declining? Many say office vacancy rates are around 30%, exceeding the 15% danger threshold. A lot of foreign investment has already pulled out. Factories and other operations are moving to Southeast Asia. It's become quiet all of a sudden. Factories in Dongguan and across Guangdong are suddenly empty. Our warehouse, whether it's been a day, 10 days, or half a month, hardly anyone comes to check the machines. After May, it all went quiet. Can you feel it? Look at all these machines. Not a single person in sight. People just can't keep going. At this rate, will 90% of factories shut down? Across China, businesses are closing, and unemployment is rising. Official figures have long been criticized as false. The party has even invented the term flexible employment to disguise real unemployment. I just don't understand. What's a flexible employment worker? It's just a fancy name experts give to people who are already unemployed with no work. Experts take something ugly or difficult and give it a high-sounding label. It's unbelievable. If you're poor, you're poor. If you have no job, you have no job. If you have no work, you're unemployed. But call them flexible employment workers, and suddenly it sounds like these people always have work. Like their problems can be solved anytime. By that logic, should the people sleeping on the bridges be called flexible accommodation workers? Meaning they always have somewhere to stay? Experts spend all day making up fancy names instead of solving real problems for ordinary people. Are they doing it for statistics or to cover up the truth? The world's cleverest experts, when faced with reality, still can't admit it. They make up flashy names to make it look like everything's fine. What nonsense is this? A vlogger pointed out that China now has over 240 million people in flexible employment, and the number keeps growing. Excluding students, the working age population nationwide aged 16 to 59 is 740 million. That means one in every three workers is in flexible employment. Everyone knows that this so-called flexible employment is really just a reluctant alternative for those who can't find stable work. This is the largest gig market in Zhengzhou. Every morning, so many people come looking for work. Some are here by four o'clock and still can't find anything. Look, it's already past seven, and there are still people waiting who haven't been picked up. Gig work is really tough, so hard to get by. A female restaurant owner shared a video about a young man in his 20s who came in. He asked if he could eat for free, saying he had heard there was free food. He explained he's been looking for work, but no one hired him. He had no place to stay and no money for food. She told him he could come anytime he needed. When he left, he had left his blanket outside the shop to dry. On May 29, 2020, then-premier Li Keqiang admitted at the National People's Congress press conference that 600 million people in China earned about 1,000 yuan a month. In a medium-sized city, 1,000 yuan barely covers rent. Beyond low-income workers, China has roughly 250 to 300 million retirees, whose pensions are around just a few hundred yuan a month. Blogger Hu Jing noted, We all want to know, where is this wealth going? Through a mix of planned and market economies, the party monopolizes key industries while turning its own wealth into liquid assets sent overseas, invested in stocks, funds, trusts, and other ventures. The elite are richer than countries, while ordinary people remain poor. Their relationship with the people is like a princess ruling over 700 million small, poor citizens. China expert Yang Bo explained that the economy keeps sliding, and party leaders are fully aware. Xi Jinping and his confidant Cai Qi have repeatedly instructed state media to promote a bright economic narrative, trying to paint a rosy picture. But because official data is often falsified, even top leaders may not know the real situation. They worry the regime could collapse and try to protect themselves by seeking accurate data. Former legal advisor to the Inner Mongolia government, Du Wen, recently revealed that Cai Qi submitted an internal economic report to Xi Jinping, bypassing the National Bureau of Statistics. Using the general office's resources, they created an independent data system, showing that the party no longer trusts official statistics. Du Wen said, Cai Qi reported that local finances are generally strained, rigid expenditures are rising, and revenues can't cover them. These include government operations, debt repayment, wages for contract staff, and project payments. Even in wealthier provinces, these rigid costs now take up over 90% of available funds. Local governments have little room to maneuver, and development funds are virtually non-existent. Even more serious, local governments are running out of revenue-generating capacity and have increasingly become a heavy burden on central finances. The central government is relying on transfer payments to maintain social welfare, long-term and special bonds to stabilize growth, and borrowing new debt to repay old. Local governments survive only because the central government swaps their debts. Overall debt is growing larger and harder to control, while the central government's ability to adjust and intervene is shrinking. Confidential reports also warn that the biggest risks lie in local government debt, especially major public projects with severe cash flow shortages. A wave of defaults could happen at any time. Construction stoppages for these projects are already occurring. Political and social risks rise when contractors and migrant workers collectively defend their rights. Delays in government payments are lengthening, pushing some companies toward bankruptcy. On industry data, Caixin's report notes that by the end of April 2026, China's producer price index had been negative for 42 consecutive months. The manufacturing purchasing manager's index stayed below 50% for 17 straight months, signaling contraction. Among 40 key industries, 31 saw falling prices. The report says companies are under the most severe cost pressures on record. Production costs for industrial firms above the designated size have hit their highest level since 2018, while profit margins have fallen to the lowest level since records began in 2012. Caixin notes that Chinese companies' problems are no longer just low profits, their business logic itself has been disrupted. Companies now face five major pressures, weak demand, slow receivables, falling prices, policy uncertainty, and declining entrepreneurial confidence. He highlights that many firms, even if showing revenue on paper, face serious triangle debt problems, simply cannot be collected. Local governments delay payments, state-owned enterprises withhold funds, and large companies squeeze small and medium-sized businesses, leaving many private firms losing more the harder they work. Beyond domestic pressures, foreign investment trends are causing Beijing serious concern. On May 23rd, the Ministry of Commerce reported that April foreign direct investment fell 26.1% year-on-year, indicating continued capital withdrawal from mainland China. Caixin's report notes that many multinational companies are not immediately closing factories in China, but they are cutting new investment, shifting new production capacity to Vietnam, India, and Mexico, and gradually moving regional headquarters, top talent, and profits overseas. They still operate in China, but no longer put major bets on the Chinese market. Du Wen believes that the withdrawal of foreign investment is one of Xi Jinping's biggest current anxieties, and the party has indeed introduced many measures to try to prevent capital outflows. According to Du Wen, when Caixin reported to Xi, he first praised the leadership, attributing economic failures to historic responsibility, and claiming these issues are gradually being resolved. He asserted that under Xi's guidance, the overall situation is stabilizing and improving. At the same time, Caixin did not hide the systemic crisis in China's fiscal system, effectively issuing a critical condition warning to Zhongnanhai. While this report cannot be independently verified, many analysts believe its content reflects China's real economic situation. The most striking point in Caixin's report is that local governments have nearly lost their ability to generate revenue. Official data show that in 2025, local general public budget revenues were about 12.21 trillion yuan, with central government transfers reaching 10.19 trillion yuan. Local expenditures totaled 24.4 trillion yuan, leaving a deficit of 800 billion yuan. The 2026 budget continues this pattern. Local revenues are projected to grow 2.4 percent. Central transfers to local governments rise to about 10.42 trillion yuan, and local deficits remain around 800 billion yuan. Among China's 28 provinces and municipalities, Shanghai, once the last province with a fiscal surplus, has now fully fallen. Eastern powerhouse provinces like Guangdong, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang still have some self-sufficiency, between 67 and 77 percent, but many central and western provinces have self-sufficiency as low as 20 to 30 percent, with Tibet only around 10 percent. This means that for every yuan spent, most provinces generate only 0.2 to 0.5 yuan themselves. The rest relies entirely on central transfers, and central funds come from taxes collected from the provinces. In effect, the labor and output of economically developed provinces are continually used to support less developed regions. Under the party's common prosperity rhetoric, shared poverty is becoming a real possibility. The root cause of fiscal hemorrhaging and economic decline is systemic. Local governments have long relied on urban investment platforms and PPPs for hidden financing of infrastructure, accumulating massive off-balance sheet debt. Officially recognized hidden debt has exceeded 14 trillion yuan, while international estimates put local hidden debt as high as 60 to 70 trillion yuan. Regarding Du Wen's leaked economic data, Dr. Chen Wenjia, vice president of Kainan University and a PhD from Osaka University of Commerce, told New Tang Dynasty Television that the report signals a politically sensitive message, that Xi may no longer even trust his own official statistics system. He said, normally, China's economic data should come from Li Chang's state council and from the Bureau of Statistics, but now that Cai Qi has reportedly created a separate survey system, it suggests Xi Jinping may be worried that lower-level officials are only reporting good news and hiding problems. Shanghai entrepreneur Hu Liren also says the figures leaked by Du Wen completely match the current economic situation in the mainland. He noted that China has a long history of data manipulation. He said, in the past, economic data released by the Ministry of Commerce often diverged completely from reality. This served the political needs of the Communist Party. It wasn't just Xi Jinping. Former leaders like Jiang Zemin and Deng Xiaoping also received internal economic data that differed significantly from what was publicly released. Economist Yu Weishong of UCLA also affirmed the credibility of the data, saying it more accurately reflects China's actual economic conditions. Discussing the reasons behind China's economic problems, Yu said, the Chinese government has a mindset of catching up with Britain and surpassing the U.S. It wants to make China the world's largest and strongest economy, and it will use every method to achieve that goal. He added that China's economy has long been in a state of overinvestment, with debt accumulating steadily. He said, this has already caused significant problems, so I believe China's economic issues are the result of structural imbalances and distorted policy direction. Because of a shortage of funds, Beijing recently cracked down on brokers that help domestic investors trade U.S. stocks, Futu Holdings, iTiger, and Longbridge Securities. All three were fined, and the government plans a two-year overhaul of existing business, followed by a complete shutdown of domestic websites. Experts agree that Beijing aims to curb capital outflows and seize private wealth to ease fiscal pressure, but this is only a temporary measure and cannot stop the overall economic decline. Commentator Qin Mian said that China's economic collapse, especially the failure of local governments to generate revenue, is multidimensional, systemic, and fatal. It affects the economy, society, and politics, intensifying conflicts between the central and local governments. With empty government coffers, grassroots resistance is bound to rise. In 2025, there were more than 5,000 protests nationwide, a sharp increase from the previous year. In early 2026, similar events remained frequent. In provinces such as Henan, Shandong, and Guangdong, teachers and civil servants experienced wage delays, cancelled allowances, or partial payments. Construction and manufacturing workers frequently clashed with employers over unpaid wages. Recently, on platforms like Douyin and Xiaohongshu, users have been posting content that is subtly or sometimes directly critical of Xi Jinping and the Communist Party, keeping the censors constantly busy. Commentator Qin Mian said that Xi is lying on a volcano. On the surface, the party's high-pressure stability measures seem to maintain control, but beneath, the unrest is bubbling.