A festering property-market meltdown offsets much of the benefit of economy’s post pandemic recovery
5 min
HONG KONG—China’s economic growth rate finished at one of the lowest levels in decades last year, underscoring the heavy toll that a property-sector collapse and weak consumer confidence have taken on the world’s second-largest economy despite the lifting of all Covid-19 restrictions.
Gross domestic product in China expanded 5.2% in the fourth quarter and for the full year in 2023, according to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics on Wednesday. The reading confirmed a number uttered by Premier Li Qiang a day earlier at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland—an unusual disclosure of a high-profile data point by a senior leader before its formal release.
Apart from the three years that China was closed to the outside world during the pandemic, the country’s economy expanded in 2023 at the slowest annual rate since 1990, the year after the political turmoil of the student movement that was crushed around Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in June 1989.
In 2022, China’s economy grew 3%, while 2020—the initial year of Covid-19—saw growth of just 2.2%. This year’s outcome was flattered in part by comparison with the relatively low base of 2022, when harsh pandemic lockdowns swept the nation, crimping growth.
Last year’s 5.2% growth rate managed to top the government’s official target of around 5% growth, following a year of volatility and shifting expectations.
Maintaining growth at a similar pace this year may prove harder, given policymakers’ hesitance so far to launch any big-ticket stimulus packages. Forecasts for China’s growth rate this year among several global investment banks range from 4% to 4.9%. China is expected to announce any formal growth target at an annual legislative session set to take place in March.
In the near term, China has few obvious growth drivers. Export demand is softening as the global economy is projected to slow this year. Chinese families, hit by years of pandemic restrictions and receiving no direct financial support from the government, have turned cautious on spending amid a weak job market. Private businesses have been holding off on new investments while foreign investors are pulling funds out of the country.
The Chinese leadership’s determination to cultivate new engines of growth, in fields such as electric vehicles and renewable energy, is bearing fruit. Still, in the near term, it won’t likely be enough to make up for the shortfalls in job creation and overall growth rate from the rapid decline in its once-mighty real-estate sector.
In the longer run, China faces a daunting list of headwinds, including a population that is rapidly skewing older, high debt levels and a worsening external political environment that has seen relations with the U.S.-led West plummet.
Wednesday’s data release offered fresh signs of the dire state of the country’s demographics. Official statisticians said China’s population shrank by 2.08 million people last year, falling to 1.410 billion, after declining in 2022 for the first time in decades.
Economists are concerned that China may be falling into a vicious cycle in which falling prices and weak demand reinforce one another, as they did in Japan in the 1990s. Chinese policymakers’ reluctance to stimulate more forcefully has confounded many economists, though others have pointed to leader Xi Jinping’s ideologically-rooted reluctance to shower the economy with government money.
Instead, Chinese authorities have unleashed a barrage of smaller-bore measures, such as trimming key interest rates, cutting mortgage costs for home buyers and prodding banks to lend more to distressed property developers. Collectively, though, those measures have done little to reverse downward pressure on the economy. The government said in the fall that it would issue $137 billion in government debt, the biggest stimulus measure it has undertaken so far—though still not enough to reverse the downward momentum, economists say.
“I wonder if they are not realising how big the risk is if deflation pressure becomes entrenched,” says Alicia García-Herrero, chief Asia economist at investment bank Natixis.
Chinese stocks fell after the data was released. The CSI 300 index was down 1.4%, putting it on course to close at its lowest level in almost five years. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index, which includes the shares of many Chinese companies, was around 3.7% lower.
The country’s stock market is now in a multi-year slump, with foreign portfolio managers fleeing and individual investors in the country switching to safer assets. The poor state of the economy is a constant concern.
The past year had started off with a sense of buoyant optimism, as the abandonment of three years of stifling Covid-related restrictions spurred a revival of spending by consumers.
But the reopening momentum quickly lost steam after the first quarter, as global demand for Chinese-made exports—a key pillar of China’s economy throughout the pandemic years—began to wane. Persistent high youth unemployment and weak wage growth further weighed on average households’ fragile confidence.
In the fall, factory activity weakened again and consumer prices dropped into deflationary territory.
Throughout it all, a yearslong decline in Chinese home prices showed no sign of abating, further depriving revenue for debt-laden developers and eroding homeowners’ wealth and sense of financial security.
Looking ahead, economists have called on leaders in Beijing to step in forcefully to stabilize home prices and contain the risk of widening defaults among property developers.
“The key thing to watch in 2024 is if and when the central government would step in and take the main responsibility to stop the contagion,” said Larry Hu, chief China economist at Macquarie Group.
Whether Beijing can revive consumer confidence will be another key metric to watch this year.
In the central Chinese city of Wuhan, Bella Liu, a 32-year-old employee of a telecommunications firm, remembered 2023 as a year marked by plunging profits and frequent layoffs in her industry. After suffering a nearly 20% loss from her mutual fund investments, she is now parking more of her money in time deposits at her bank.
“In an era of slowing economic growth, I just feel lucky that I have a job,” Liu said.
Full-year economic data released by China on Wednesday showed retail sales, a key gauge of consumer spending, gained 7.4% in December and rose 7.2% for the full year compared with the respective year-earlier periods. Retail sales had fallen 0.2% for the full year in 2022.
The new data suggest that the economy is again beginning to rely more on domestic demand after counting on exports as the main pillar of growth during the pandemic years. Consumption was the largest contributor to overall growth in 2023. Still, it is unclear how much of a role it will play in driving the Chinese economy this year, in part because the release of pent-up pandemic demand has largely run its course, according to economists from Nomura.
Investment was also lackluster in 2023. Fixed-asset investment growth slowed last year, rising 3.0% for the full year compared with a 5.1% expansion in 2022. Private-sector investment, too, remained weak, falling 0.4% in 2023 compared with a year earlier as policy uncertainty spooked entrepreneurs. Private-sector investment had risen 0.9% in 2022.
Over the course of 2023, Beijing rolled out measures aimed at reining in the technology sector, including the video game industry, while warning about foreign espionage and detaining employees of foreign firms operating in China.
Readings of the property sector offered more reason for caution. New home prices in China’s 70 major cities dropped at a faster clip toward the end of 2023.
Average new home prices in December fell 0.45% from November, and 0.89% when from a year earlier, according to calculations by The Wall Street Journal based on data released by the statistics bureau. The pace of both declines was worse than in November.
For the full year, property investment fell 9.6%, while new construction starts dropped 20.4% and home sales by value declined 6.0%.
The surveyed urban unemployment edged up to 5.1% in December, from 5% in November. Economists have cast doubt on the accuracy of official statistics on joblessness in large part because the survey leaves out the country’s nearly 300 million migrant workers.
In a surprise move, China released a revised youth unemployment figure for the first time since July, when it abruptly suspended the publication of the data series amid a run of fresh record-high readings up to 21.3%.
On Wednesday, China’s statistics bureau said that it would publish a new urban youth unemployment figure each month for people age 16 to 24 that excludes students. The reading was 14.9% in December.
The statistics bureau said that the new methodology offers a more refined and comprehensive picture that would “better reflect the employment situation” by only including graduates who were looking for work.
Still, the economy had pockets of strength, especially in dominating the global supply chain for renewable energy products such as solar panels and electric vehicles. Growth in industrial production rebounded to 4.6%, accelerating from a 3.6% increase the year before, Wednesday’s data show.
—Grace Zhu and Xiao Xiao in Beijing contributed to this article.
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As AI productivity trackers reshape workplace evaluations, employees are learning how to manage calendars, activity levels and AI usage to ensure their contributions are recognized.
4 min
What’s more important than being a good employee right now? Looking like a good employee in the eyes of AI productivity trackers that more managers are using to evaluate their teams.
Employee-monitoring systems are especially popular at tech companies and are also used by other white-collar firms that want to probe how people spend company time. The scary thing: You might not even know you’re being watched because many states don’t require disclosure.
Metrics can include performance data that is undoubtedly relevant, such as sales results. But it also can employ dubious proxies like keyboard strokes and how often your computer screen goes into sleep mode.
We generally accepted, or at least understood, heightened surveillance during the work-from-home era. Back then it seemed reasonable for bosses to keep tabs on employees they couldn’t see.
Yet the oversight has only escalated, and tensions are rising, too.
A group of former Meta Platforms employees alleges in a lawsuit that the company used a “constellation of internal artificial-intelligence systems” when it began laying off about 10% of its workforce in May. Meta says humans make termination calls.
However that case shakes out, a couple of things are clear. Companies eager to gauge which employees are locked in now have sophisticated AI monitoring systems at their disposal. And they believe they have leverage in a tepid labor market.
So while we may chafe at having our worth reduced to numbers on the boss’s productivity dashboard, we have to play the game as it’s being played. Here are some tips, based on conversations with people who make employee monitoring systems—and others who game the systems.
Calendar integration is one way that productivity trackers have gotten more advanced and, ostensibly, fairer.
Let’s say you make an old-fashioned phone call or attend an in-person meeting. Your Outlook or Slack status may switch to “away,” making you appear as inactive as if you were taking an extended coffee break.
Employee monitors like one made by a company called Insightful cross-check your online status with your calendar to see whether there is a valid reason for your apparent inactivity. If that call or meeting is on your schedule, then the system will recognize that you are busy offline. If nothing is on the books, it could look like you’re slacking off.
Let’s not go any further without addressing the underlying question: How much downtime is permissible during the workday? After all, people have been scared to let managers see anything non-work-related on their screens since personal computers first arrived in offices.
No one knows this better than Roger Wagner, who is widely credited with creating the first “boss button” in the early 1980s. He designed a keyboard shortcut to instantly display a spreadsheet if the boss walked by your cubicle while you were playing a computer game. Boss buttons have been features of countless diversions since. (I confess to using one built into a March Madness streaming app.)
Wagner, the founder of computer-education company 1010 Technologies, says his original design was a joke—more of a commentary on overbearing managers than a cover for lazy employees. Good bosses understand workers need mental breaks throughout the day, he says.
This matches what I heard from Insightful Chief Executive Ivan Petrovic. He says customers that use his company’s workforce-management platform don’t expect employees to stay on task 100% of the time.
“On average companies are aiming for 60% to 80% of your time being utilized for work during the day,” he says.
Go ahead and exhale. It’s probably OK to watch an occasional YouTube video at your desk.
And if you’re going to artificially inflate your activity level, be careful. Hitting 90% could look suspicious.
So don’t leave your mouse jiggler on all day. Choose the right one if you must resort to shenanigans.
There are lots of software applications that mimic the movements of a computer mouse, so you can appear to be working while away from your desk. There are also devices that plug into computer ports and do the same thing.
Corporate cybersecurity systems increasingly block these apps and devices, and productivity trackers claim to be able to detect them. But some workers swear by mouse docks, like one made by Tech8 USA, that keep cursors moving. The company originally made mouse-moving software but now focuses on physical jigglers.
“People are drawn to mechanical solutions because they’re so simple and don’t require software,” says Tech8 Marketing Director Sam Matthews. “As monitoring technology becomes more sophisticated, that distinction has become even more relevant.”
Another popular metric for employee-monitoring systems is AI usage. Companies want to know who is embracing new tools, and it can be tempting to think more is better.
“There’s a performative aspect where employees overblow their usage of AI so that they appear relevant in the organization,” says Andrea Derler, principal researcher at Visier, which helps companies track and analyze employee work habits.
In a recent Visier survey of 1,000 U.S. workers, 48% admitted to exaggerating their AI usage.
This is already an outdated strategy. Using AI for everything used to score points for experimentation. Now it can seem wasteful because many companies are watching AI token spending more carefully.
Look, productivity theater has always been part of work. Most of us aren’t trying to cheat the system, but expectations are changing so quickly that we need to be savvy about what the latest employee trackers are looking for.
Sometimes it takes a little gamesmanship to get full credit for our contributions.
