Economic shift shows in lack of data

People always complain about China's lack of transparency in economic information. But there are two types of opaqueness in a time of transition.

One type is that the government is hiding the true picture on purpose, mainly to save face and to not scare investors away from the market, but more often than not, doing that does not help. Investors can draw their own versions of the big picture and there can't be misled.

Is this what the Chinese government has been doing? From all major economic data that the National Bureau of Statistics has recently released, such as the monthly records in foreign trade and industrial output, one can obviously tell that things are bad. What officials call downward pressure is obviously hanging on, and may be getting worse in one way or another.