Chinese dissenting economist Gao Shanwen dies
- William Gumede
Gao Shanwen last year outraged the Chinese Communist Party leadership when he said China's official post-Covid-19 GDP numbers may not be accurate.
The independent-minded Chinese economist Gao Shanwen, 54, who courageously challenged the reliability of China’s official Gross Domestic Production data, who argued the United States deserved much more credit for the Asian dragon’s economic miracle, and who warned of the post-high growth stagnation of Chinese society saying the post-Covid country is “full of vibrant old people, lifeless young people and despairing middle-aged people”.
Gao Shanwen died after a year of cancer treatment, according to news reports, including the Chinese state-run Shanghai Securities News, on July 7. Chinese media reports said a Hong Kong hospital diagnosed him with stage IV T-cell lymphoma in December 2025.
Gao Shanwen last year outraged the Chinese Communist Party leadership when he, in Washington DC at an event hosted by the Peterson Institute for International Economics said China's official post-Covid-19 GDP numbers may not be accurate.
GDP is the total monetary value of all finished goods and services produced within a country's borders during a specific period. It serves as the primary measure to determine the size and wealth of an economy.
Speaking in late 2025 in Washington, he said the Chinese economy was likely expanding only at an average pace of around 2%, lower than the officially reported figure of close to 5%.
"We do not know the true number of China's real growth figure," Gao Shanwen, then chief economist at SDIC Securities, said.
"I think it might be more reasonable to expect a growth rate between 3% to 4% in the years to come, for the next three to five years," Gao said. "But we know, and I think, the official number will always be around 5%."
If China’s official GDP is indeed inflated, consumption and growth forecasts based on these figures could be misleading.
The Chinese Communist Party ordered an investigation into Gao and disciplined him following the remarks. This was not the first investigation, and reprimand of Gao, because of critical reviews he made of the Chinese government’s management of the economy, politics, and society. Gao Shanwen disappeared from public view following his questioning of the Chinese government’s official growth data. Gao Shanwen had also previously disappeared from public view under unexplained circumstances — as often the case in the country with critics of Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Gao Shanwen also in late 2024 openly challenged official data about China’s GDP growth, arguing that it may have been inflated by 10 percentage points between 2021 and 2023. In 2024 at an investor conference in Shenzhen, he described the Chinese youth as “lifeless,” because of the high unemployment crisis plaguing the youth. He said China’s inability to create jobs for the youth was among the reasons for the lower economic growth rates. His Shenzhen speech went viral. Gao’s 2024 Shenzhen speech was widely distributed and discussed on the WeChat, the Chinese platform. The Wall Street Journal reported in January 2025 that Chinese leader Xi Jinping had ordered an investigation of Gao and directed authorities to discipline him. The Chinese government promptly removed it from WeChat and other online platforms, posting the warning: “This content is no longer available due to complaints of violations.”
Long-standing doubts over China’s GDP data
There have been long-standing doubts over the veracity of China's GDP data. Government officials set economic growth targets in successive Five-Year Plans that govern the country's economic planning. Meeting the growth targets is the central performance metric used by the Chinese government to measure the performance of China’s party, political and state officials, and regional and local governments.
Individual promotion, and budget allocations to state entities, regions and local governments are based on them meeting these economic growth targets. This means that officials are under pressure not to miss their targets, which often creates an upwards bias in their reporting. However, officials are often under pressure to reach their targets, which may create an environment to bump up local growth figures. As a case in point, in June 2013, it was reported that 28 companies in Luliang county in Yunnan province had reported industrial output that was more than double what their actual production was the year before. According to Chinese state-owned Xinhua newsagency, the companies defended themselves and said that local officials had induced them to do so in exchange for loans from state-owned banks. China’s National Bureau of Statistics is capturing its own statistics based on data from businesses and household activities, to calculate economic growth, rather than to be over reliant on data from local governments.
The Chinese Communist Party has made high economic growth rates the pillar of economic performance, unlike African liberation movements of the left, such as the ANC who have rejected economic growth’s centrality, wrong-headedly saying it is ‘neoliberal’, and a World Bank and International Monetary Fund ‘structural adjustment’ doctrine’. China’s emphasis on securing growth has delivered the country one of the modern world’s most astonishing economic miracles. While African countries who have rejected economic growth is the central priority, has in the main remain poorer or became poorer than they were at the end of colonialism.
Before becoming China’s Premier in 2013, the late economist Li Keqiang had also questioned the reliability of Chinese GDP. An economic pragmatist, Li Keqiang, who won the Sun Yefang Economics Prize for his doctoral studies in economics at Peking University. As Premier, from 2013 to 2023, Li Keqiang prioritised structural economic reform and debt reduction, termed "Likonomics", which was aimed at reducing China's dependency on debt-fuelled growth and steer the economy towards self-sustainability, was reported to have said to look instead at three direct indicators of economic activity: cargo volume on railways, electricity consumption, and bank loans. Li Keqiang launched campaigns to tackle corruption at the local level and on false trade invoices.
In a 2016 research note, the Bank of Finland noted: “Given that Chinese GDP statistics give rise to suspicions, several research institutes also use alternative indicators for monitoring China’s economy. These offer additional viewpoints for discussion but, considering their current scope of coverage, they do not suffice to replace GDP as a comprehensive indicator of macroeconomic activity. The biggest problem with regard to alternative indicators is that they are unable to account for the structural change in the Chinese economy. They mainly illustrate the evolution of heavy industry, construction and foreign trade, failing to adequately capture the growth of the service sector and private consumption”.
China’s high-growth, global factory development model
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has stayed in power for so long, compared to other communist parties, through an unspoken social contract, in which the CCP delivers high levels of economic growth, and with it mass prosperity for large numbers of Chinese, in return for citizens foregoing individual political rights.
Unlike other ruling communist parties, such as the former Soviet Union communist parties, and except the Vietnamese Communist Party, the Chinese Communist Party has pursued state capitalism. This has been centred in a market economy, providing the right to use property, allowing the private sector to drive industrialisation, with the state governing the market by coordinating industrial expansion, infrastructure expansion, technology development, setting economic growth targets, all in partnership with the private sector.
The Chinese society is highly competitive, with individuals competing on merit to join the public service, and provincial and local governments competing with each other to deliver the best public services and products. And private companies competing cut-throat with each other and with international companies in the domestic markets; private domestic companies competing with state companies; and Chinese private and state companies vigorously seeking global markets.
Industrialisation has focused on manufacturing, with the centrepiece of Chinese industrialisation has been for the country to become the world’s factory. China’s industrialisation has been to invite international companies with the technology, capital, management skills, and consumers to set up in China, to assemble their products in China – and China copying the knowhow, technology, and integrating local firms into the global value chains of these international companies. Developing modern infrastructure is a key element of its industrialisation. Attracting foreign investment has been critical to China’s economic growth, unlike left-leaning African liberation movements, such as South Africa’s African National Congress, which are lukewarm about foreign investment.
Globally competition education is a central plank of China’s economic strategy to raise individual and country prosperity, with STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education at the heart of the country’s industrialisation strategy. The Chinese also manages its diverse 55 different ethnic groups, by aggressively emphasising a collective, common Chinese identity, rather than individual ethnic community identities.
The Chinese government fosters accountability – which is absolutely essential for the successful functioning of any government, economic, development or political system, and for a peaceful society, by governing China as a rules-based society – everyone in society must follow rules, behave responsibly and accountably, by ensuring corruption is low, and with a merit-based public sector, and a merit-based private sector entrepreneurship system.
China’s social contract: high growth and return for reduce political freedoms
The Chinese Communist Party’s legitimacy depends on maintaining high levels of economic growth, which brings mass prosperity for large numbers of Chinese, combined with a merit-based system in the public and private sector, ensuring accountability by its political leaders, and low levels of official corruption, in return for citizens foregoing individual political rights. China has suppressed public criticisms of the CCP, proscribe the Internet and enforce a collective Chinese national identity, punishing any attempts by citizens to assert individual or regional ethnic identities.
If Gao is right that China's GDP averaged only around 2% in the last two to three years even though the official number is "close to 5%", it will be very difficult for the Chinese government to maintaining the social contract of providing mass individual prosperity, in return to citizens foregoing individual democratic rights and freedoms.
The Chinese Communist Party, under the leadership of Xi Jinping has, as a post-Covid-19 lockdown economic recovery strategy, been trying to change the direction of the Chinese, by transforming from an export-manufacturing one, which depends on global consumers, to a domestic consumption-led economy. The Chinese authorities have loosened monetary policy, increased the budget deficit, and issued more debt to boost consumption and maintain stable economic growth.
A pivotal aspect of the Chinese government’s post-Covid-19 economic reforms is to get young people to help drive a consumption-led growth recovery of the economy. Gao Shanwen Shenzhen's speech criticisms were interpreted by the Chinese government as he saying that the country’s attempt to refocus on consumption-led growth, has failed so far.
Gao Shanwen had also previously sparked intense national debate in China over critical comments of the country’s continued long-term economic sustainability, the dangers of massive social fragmentation and future political instability, given a prolonged slowdown in the country’s economic growth levels.
Gao Shanwen in the 2025 Washington DC speech also questioned Beijing’s ability to boost its economy as threats loom from a property meltdown, burgeoning debt, deflation, declining domestic consumer demand, and trade tariffs from the US and other developed countries. Gao said that China’s changing demographics, a large youth and elderly population, will likely constrain economic growth levels.
A lower economic growth rate will mean that China’s high youth unemployment rate will continue and even worsen. In 2024 Gao in his Shenzhen investor conference speech described China’s post-pandemic society as being “full of vibrant old people, lifeless young people and despairing middle-aged people”. He said China’s youth were “turning off the lights and eating noodles”, rather than contributing their disposable income to the economy.
“The GDP growth rate has been overestimated by 3 percentage points each year, and by 10 percentage points cumulatively, which corresponds to the loss of 47 million employed people in urban areas,” Gao told the Shenzhen investor conference, according to a copy of the speech posted by the China Digital Times website. Gao predicted that China may take around nine years to return to higher growth levels, following the Covid-19 economic decline.
Gao in his Shenzhen speech observed that Chinese regions with younger populations had disproportionally severely suffered from poorer economic performance since end of Covid-19 lockdowns, while regions with older populations recorded faster growth.
“For the elderly, … there will be no impact on their income, and they can continue to enjoy their twilight years and dance in public places,” Gao added. “For young people, income expectations have been significantly revised downward, the certainty of income growth has been significantly revised downward,” he said. “They can’t find jobs, or the jobs they find are significantly different from their expectations.”
Gao warned the Chinese leaders against adopting a hostile relationship with the United States
In 2018, Gao also angered the Chinese Communist Party leaders and unleashed a national debate in China, when he in a speech said that China’s extraordinary economic rise since the late 1960s, has been integrally linked to the fact that China interlinked its economy, to that of the United States. He warned that the moment China takes an aggressive trade policy with the US, China’s economy will be hammered, and China’s youth will suffer the most, as the Chinese economy, will not be able to deliver higher economic rates and employment to the youth in a trade war with the US.
Gao also warned in his 2018 speech that China, as a nation was “mentally unprepared” for clashing trade and political battles with the US. He cautioned the Chinese Communist Party leadership not to do anything to harm China’s relationship with the US, saying it will plunge the Chinese economy into long-term stagnation, which will trap China’s youth into long-term unemployment. Gao’s 2018 speech was also quickly removed by the Chinese government from social media.
His Chinese critics slammed him for saying this, claiming he wanted China to "surrender" to the US in a trade war.
From state economist to dissent
Gao started his career as an economist at People’s Bank of China in 1995. He left the state to join the Everbright Securities Research Institute as chief economist in 2003, before moving on to Essence Securities in 2007, and stayed there after the company rebranded itself as SDIC Securities in late 2023. He left the firm in November 2025.
Because of his criticisms of Chinese government’s economic policies, his securities industry registration was cancelled at the end of 2025, according to a Securities Association of China record.
Gao leaves a legacy of courageously challenging the Chinese authorities, providing alternative policy alternatives and views, in a society, where conformity to the Chinese Community Party line is resolutely enforced. After his death announcement, there was an outpouring of praise of him on online platforms. One use wrote on Weibo, the Chinese online platform: “The one who dared to speak out and tell the truth is gone.”
William Gumede is Visiting Associate Professor, School of Governance, 91心頭利, and author of South Africa in BRICS (Tafelberg). He writes in his own capacity.