We put ourselves down the path of endless speculation and jumping at shadows if we just automatically assume any and all data provided by China is outright falsehoods. There are people in China employed to track these statistics and there is material benefits to having these statistics available to the public. There's even incentive for this information to be true.

If the information simply coming from China is enough to dismiss them as China spreading their agenda, then the same could earnestly be argued for any other country on Earth. This kind of logic is the same logic QAnon types use to immediately dismiss evidence.

"The vaccine is causing people to die in huge numbers. What do you mean you disagree? I've seen it, and my family has seen it. Those statistics saying otherwise? Let me guess, they're provided by the vaccine companies?"

The average restaurant lifespan is like 3 years, and malls are emptying around the world because of the rise of ecommerce. These are anecdotes that hold both in good economic conditions and in bad economic conditions. China's going through a bit of an D2C ecommerce revolution with Douyin (274B USD in the first 10 months of 2023, growing 60% YoY) and others. For reference, Amazon's sales from their ecommerce platform is around 350B USD for 2023, and its definitely not growing 60% YoY.