This is a series. I on the world. I'm John Bachelors. My colleague and co-host and we're very pleased to welcome Alan Tonelson, our guru on manufacturing and global trade these last decades,

guiding us to understand what we can of the mysteries of the non-transparent and deliberately deceptive Chinese manufacturing numbers.

Although I report to you, Alan, that Bloomberg says,

Chinese factory activity is declined for the fourth straight month.

And then we come to a headline at the Distinguished Foreign Affairs.

China's real economic crisis, why Beijing won't give up on a failing model. Odd, a

failing model. My understanding is that Shijinping is concerned with one thing which is control, requiring surveillance, requiring

what we would call interference in people's lives, not prosperity.

Is that the failing model that the surveillance

no longer working for him?

Good evening to you, Alan.

Hi, John, and hi Gordon. There's, that's absolutely right but there's one other problem with

Zijin ping's view of the world of the economy and even of Chinese society and that is that as the Wall Street Journal's economic

columnist Greg Giff pointed out the other day, Zizhin Ping and presumably the rest of the Chinese leadership,

the top leadership, views fostering personal consumption

as a sign of weakness, as a sign of laziness, as a sign of what they call

welfareism. They want China to be a manufacturing, industrial, and

technological superpower because that's the best way that they can advance China's goals

of continually increasing its influence over all aspects of world affairs,

and boosting personal consumption in that respect doesn't cut it.

Gordon, you have a question for Alan.

Alan, because China's regime doesn't want to boost consumption.

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