Beastly numbers

I came upon an intriguing - but rather disturbing - fact in the article I just mentioned in that little rant on statistics a moment ago.   How many new jobs were created in China in the first half of this year?  6.66 million, according to the official government figures.   It's rather too suspiciously round a figure, isn't it?  Let's not get into all the 'Book of Revelations' imagery associated with it!   As I've observed before, one can't really trust any official statistics coming out of this country - partly because people will lie so freely to promote a desired image, and partly because statistical methodology is so slapdash.  (I rather suspect, also, that there may be a problem with the Chinese language itself - or at any rate with the culture of thought that has grown up here - that fosters an extreme conceptual woolliness, which often seems to swamp analytical thought or attention to detail.  People often just don't seem to notice that the statistics they're quoting are implausible, impossible, inconsistent, undefined, devoid of crucial context, meaningless.)    You see, they don't actually explain what that figure is.  How are 'new jobs' counted?  And are they counted in isolation (I rather think so!), or offset against the number of jobs lost?   Even if this really is the total of jobs added to the Chinese employment market, the surplus of newly created jobs over lost jobs.... well, it's still not very much, given the size of the country.  And given the fact that the 'official' figure for the annual increase in job-seekers (probably assessed very conservatively, if not wilfully misrepresented) is 20 million.   Any way you look at it, there are a lot of folks without jobs here at the moment.