SHOCKING report on the total collapse of business in China by the Financial Times was yesterday blown out of the water by users on x dotcom—and then the newspaper's own source joined critics of the news outlet.
The FT reported on Thursday that Chinese entrepreneurship had virtually disappeared, with just 1,202 companies launched last year. Evidence was data from a monitoring service called IT-Juzi.
The grim report by FT writer Eleanor Olcott and its eye-catching graph was viewed more than a million times on x dotcom, slotting naturally into the excessively negative narrative the paper carries every day on mainland China and Hong Kong.
'VOICE OF REASON' The first person to raise an objection was Arnaud Bertrand, a China-based Chinese medicine specialist who has become a popular "voice of reason" against the western narrative that is poisoning minds against the country.
He pointed out yesterday morning that if you looked at a single business sector, such as restaurants, in a single location, such as one city, you could immediately tell that there were large numbers of new companies.
Multiply that over a country of 1.4 billion people and you ended up with millions of new companies—exactly as Chinese government figures said.
ERROR IDENTIFIED Then investment specialist Glenn Luk stepped in and pointed out the precise mistake that the Financial Times had made. It had taken its figures from a narrow list that limited itself to new start-ups funded by institutional investors time-lagged to a specific period.
The data in no way could be used to determine how many new companies had been started in China, Luk pointed out.
FT writer Eleanor Olcott fought back by posting that: "IT Juzi is China’s leading data provider on startups, tracking companies across basically every conceivable vertical that a VC would be investing in."
HE SHOULD KNOW Then, yesterday, a message appeared from Wen Feixiang, the head of the company whose data was used by the Financial Times for its shocking graph.
"Hey, I am Feixiang, the ITJUZI. COM Founder and CEO," he wrote. "The citation in this article regarding the number of Chinese startup companies From ITJUZI is inaccurate."
He confirmed that his research firm's list in no way showed the total number of new firms in China.
"The only ethical thing to do at this stage for the FT is to apologize to its readers, and withdraw the article," Arnaud Bertrand posted last night.