On whose authority?

WHEN a newspaper bases an entire story on a single, anonymous source, you would expect doubts about credibility to arise. Yet there were no questions about the credibility of an “authoritative person” who opined at length about the Chinese economy in the People’s Daily earlier this month. Not just any old source gets front-page treatment in the Communist Party’s mouthpiece. In this case, it is the third time in the past year that this “authoritative person” has had an outing to discuss the state of the economy. On this occasion, he delivered a stark warning about relying on debt to fuel economic growth. That, he said, could lead to crisis and to a collapse in growth.

Speculation is rife over who the person might be. For Pekingologists, it is a fine parlour game. There are two dominant theories. Both see the fingerprints of Liu He, a Harvard-trained economic adviser to Xi Jinping, China’s powerful president. Mr Liu has been a strong proponent of such structural reforms as cutting off funding for state-owned industries blighted by overcapacity. His views chime with the authoritative person’s message of tough love.