Two things I came across last week remind me of the inadequacies of the Chinese economic press. It is still filled with vague slogans and general figures, and does not contain much information that is useful for those who do business in this country.

Every Monday morning, managers would return to their offices to find their desks covered by many thick copies of newspapers and magazines claiming to be about the hot subject of the Chinese economy. Some you subscribe to and others are sent to you for free for obviously promotional purposes. But how many of them do you read seriously? You know. I know.

One of the things that I encountered was being asked to help a younger colleague in my office. He had been assigned to write a report about the likely prospects for the urban consumer market. But after he searched extensively on the Internet and borrowed several tomes of statistical yearbooks from the library, he was dismayed to find not much help.

In those statistical books, data about urban household spending is listed in a province by province order. But few divisions are contained in the urban sector of a province, which means the consumer power of the provincial capital city, or the most important regional business hub, gets levelled down by that of many small, and some still largely agrarian, county towns.

On the national level, the spending data is only available for a handful of cities answering directly to the central government just Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and Chongqing.

So it would be difficult, for instance, to compare the urban spending data of Shanghai with Shenzhen, a close neighbour of Hong Kong in South China's Pearl River Delta and supposedly the city with the highest income on the Chinese mainland, and with that of Xi'an and Lanzhou, two large cities in western China.

More absurd, my colleague told me that in the category of urban spending, the amount of money used on private housing purchases is not included. "Only the average rental is included," he told me.

So if my company comes to plan its sales campaign from Shanghai to Shenzhen, or to some provincial cities, particularly for a product related with housing ownership, we would have no easy way to analyze the local consumer spending structure and to set an appropriate pricing policy.

The second thing that I encountered was a survey by an overseas company about China, not a very extensive one but one with a very specific and interesting focus.

It is about electronic engineers, showing that on average, Chinese electronic engineers were making US$7,700 in annual salary, with 75 per cent of them reporting recent pay increases averaging 11 per cent, and nearly 60 per cent reporting they have received performance-based bonuses averaging more than US$1,700.

The survey also reveals that in evaluating employment opportunities, Chinese engineers rate learning new skills only less important than cash income, and above factors like promotion, benefits, employer's reputation, and location.

None of this was reported in the Chinese press, at least I couldn't find its Chinese-language version from the news search of baidu.com. But this is useful in many ways for business people to evaluate their investment opportunities, for sales managers to measure the consumer power of the technology elite in large cities, for parents to help their children choose their careers, and for employers to plan their hires.

The survey also helps demystify the so-called China threat, or the way in which China is supposedly destabilizing the world market. It largely comes from two factors working in combination, namely its engineers' low income as compared with the developed countries, and their urge to learn.

However, China's own economic press doesn't usually carry such surveys. Those domestically published economic newspapers are good at raising slogans, editorializing on general topics, throwing up general reports to touch a bit of everything, and listing dry sectoral figures usually without comparable information. These are a poor service for foreign investors trying to understand China, and for China to explain itself to the world.

At this point, it may also be useful to quote from what a leading British newspaper recently pointed out, that nowadays, many individuals in the West may not realize that their lives are being shaped in part by the rise of China "a nation of this size, at this speed." Many Chinese, at least those who are responsible for spreading its economic information, may not realize it either.

Email: younuo@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 12/19/2005 page4)