Factory output in China falls for an eighth straight month. Live from the UK, this is the Marketplace Morning Report from the BBC World Service. I'm William Lee Adams. Good morning.

Factories in China have long been an engine of economic growth, so it's rather worrying for leaders in Beijing that a new survey shows activity unexpectedly contracted in November.

It's the eighth straight month production has shrunk.

The BBC's Nick Marsh can tell us more.

Hello, Nick.

William, hello.

So you've been looking at this new data.

What's it telling us about the world's second biggest economy?

Okay, so this is the data that we get every month out of China on its manufacturing activity, its factory output.

It's called the Purchasing Managers Index.

And it's a good way of seeing how much China is producing and selling, therefore, what the state of China's economy is like overall, because

as we know, manufacturing is such an important part of the Chinese economy. Now, yesterday we got

the official figures from the government. That showed a decline for the eighth month in a row.

And then this morning, we got figures from a private survey. It's very reputable.

These figures actually even worse than the official ones yesterday. And what's going to be even

more worrying for the policymakers in Beijing is that this survey tends to look at smaller firms.

It looks at export more and it kind of looks at the sort of on the ground situation

a bit more closely. By both metrics, William, things are looking quite sluggish in the Chinese

economy. To what extent does this have to do with the trade war with the US? Some of it is,

not all of it is. So exports to the US have declined because of trade tension,

trade war, whatever you want to call it. There has been a pivot to exporting to other markets like

Europe, like Southeast Asia. That hasn't quite made up for the shortfall. The truth is,

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