Footnote:
It's worth pointing out that there appear to be more than 800,000 SMEs in Guangdong Province. If it is genuinely the case that only 10,000 of them have closed down this year – not much more than one percent – then that would tend to indicate a far greater level of resilience than one would expect in an economy that is still largely consumer product-oriented and export-driven. Good news for China, in fact. (Cue baleful and despondent looks in The Guardian Editorial Office... but that doesn't fit with the line we want to peddle at all!)
But the real point is that if I was going to write an article for a mainstream western newspaper about the impact of the global recession on China, and speculate about the potential social consequences, I would get off my backside and make some token effort to do some proper research on the subject, rather than simply casting around the Internet for the most negative-sounding information I could find, and regurgitating it.
I might start with the information from the Chinese National Development and Reform Commission's own figures, and work from there: nationwide in the first half of 2008 67,000 SMEs, each with sales income exceeding 5 million yuan, closed down, laying off more than 20 million employees.
But then I'm unlikely to find myself ever writing for The Guardian.
(China.org.cn December 13, 2008)
