Maybe China’s ruling elite that has gathered in Beijing for a twice-a-decade national congress of the Communist Party didn’t want their thunder to be stolen at such an important moment.

Maybe the world’s second-largest economy has something fishy to hide. You could believe anything since China’s National Bureau of Statistics is to delay indefinitely the release of economic data that had been scheduled for Tuesday morning.

They were also to announce numbers for economic growth from July through September, which had been expected to show continued lackluster performance.

China’s quarterly exercise is, usually, a well-choreographed and executed setting. Friday, the General Administration of Customs were to release its trade data but didn’t.

GDP numbers have to follow suit a few days after, but they have not. This unnecessary delay leaves room for interpretation.

And the economy’s path is grounded in expectations. Bad ones could lead to trouble. This year could be China`s second-slowest year of growth since 1976, as Reuters states, citing an economists poll.

Source: Refinitiv Datastream, data to Q2 2022 Y. Chen, K. Hamlin @Breakingviews

And that’s including expectations that output would have rebounded from the weak 0.4% growth in Q2 to 3.4% in the three months to the end of September.

New bank lending nearly doubled last month against August, as the central bank guided more credit support.

Officials in Beijing played down the importance of GDP targets this year, in a political move to put the Communist Party Congress into the front stage.

President Xi Jinping invoked, in his opening speech, that politics is above all else.

But the lack of communication with already affirmed accusations of dressed-up official figures can sabotage the government’s own effort to improve data quality and crack down on fake reporting.