About China Beige Book

China Beige Book

The China Beige Book is an independent online data publication on the Chinese economy, produced by China Beige Book International, known as CBB International, a research firm based in New York in the United States. Although its subject is China in its entirety — its firms, workers, borrowers, regions and industries — the organisation that collects and publishes the data sits outside China, and in the WorldNM directory it is listed under Beijing as the nominal city for foreign-based, China-focused outlets. That distinction matters for understanding what the publication is. It is not a Chinese newsroom reporting from inside the country, and it is not an official Chinese statistical release. It is a private, subscription-oriented research operation that set out to measure the Chinese economy independently, from the ground up, at a time when many investors and companies doubted that official statistics alone gave them the picture they needed.

Its flagship product, from which the publication takes its name, is a quarterly report of roughly eighty pages modelled explicitly on the Beige Book of the United States Federal Reserve. Where the Federal Reserve's document gathers anecdotal and survey evidence on American economic conditions, the China Beige Book applies a comparable survey method to China, compiling thousands of interviews with Chinese firms through an independent in-country data network. The result is a recurring, structured account of growth, employment, wages, inflation and credit — including the historically opaque world of shadow banking — broken down by region and by sector rather than presented only as a single national figure.

Founding and leadership

China Beige Book International was founded in 2010. Its co-founder and chief executive is Leland Miller, who before co-founding the firm in 2010 was a capital markets attorney based in New York and Hong Kong and worked on the deal team at a major investment bank, according to biographies published by the United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission and the United States Chamber of Commerce's China Center. Miller has run the operation ever since and is its public face: the commission describes him as running the world's largest private macroeconomic survey of China's economy and financial system, and notes that he is a frequent commentator on CNBC, Bloomberg Television, CNN and Fox Business, with his work featured regularly in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Financial Times and the Washington Post. In a later development in his public role, Miller was appointed to that same United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission, and was reappointed by Speaker Mike Johnson for a term expiring on 31 December 2027.

Craig Charney served as the firm's research and polling director in its early years, and his name appears alongside Miller's on many of the survey's early public statements reported by Bloomberg and Reuters. The pairing was deliberate in character: a China and capital-markets specialist working with an experienced polling professional, reflecting the fact that the China Beige Book is at its core a survey instrument, not a commentary product. Its authority depends on sampling, interviewing and repeated measurement rather than on opinion.

The problem it set out to solve

Miller has explained the founding logic in interviews. When the firm began in 2010, he has said, markets were not asking for another product on China, and there was pushback against what the new firm proposed to do. The underlying argument was that scepticism about Chinese statistics was widespread but unfocused: investors might doubt a headline growth number without having any independent, systematically collected alternative against which to judge conditions inside the country. The China Beige Book's answer was to build its own data — country-wide and independently collected — rather than to repackage official releases or rely on anecdote from a handful of contacts.

That founding premise shapes everything the publication does. Its own company descriptions, quoted in university and research coverage, say that it operates its own independent in-country private data network, led by hundreds of on-the-ground researchers, providing real-time economic data and customised survey work for corporate and financial-sector clients, as well as for more than a dozen of the world's largest central banks. Whether a reader encounters the China Beige Book through its paid quarterly report, through a summary released to financial news agencies, or through Miller's broadcast commentary, the claim being made is the same: that the numbers come from the firm's own repeated fieldwork inside China.

Launch of the quarterly survey in 2012

The firm was founded in 2010, but the quarterly survey that defines it was launched in 2012. Early coverage makes the timeline clear. Reporting on the survey's second quarterly edition in 2012, Bloomberg described a private survey modelled on the United States Federal Reserve's Beige Book, conducted by the New York-based researcher CBB International through interviews with about two thousand company executives and bankers. That early edition found retail sales and manufacturing strengthening and property sales increasing, and its authors — Miller and Charney — argued in a statement that official statistics probably lagged the China Beige Book's data by one to three months. From the beginning, therefore, the publication positioned its value in timeliness as well as independence: a quarterly snapshot intended to arrive ahead of, and to test, the official picture.

The survey has run quarterly ever since, which gives the publication an unusual longitudinal quality. Because the same questions are asked in the same structured way quarter after quarter, changes over time — in capital spending, in hiring, in loan demand, in borrowing costs — become part of the story. Contemporary reports noted, for example, when capital spending growth fell to its lowest level since the survey began in 2012, and when, for the first time in the survey's history, no sector showed an improvement on the previous quarter. Those comparisons are only possible because the series has been maintained continuously since 2012.

How the survey is compiled

The methodology, as described in published accounts of the firm's approach, triangulates three methods, repeated every quarter. The first is a quantitative survey of more than two thousand leading firms from key sectors across the country. The second is a set of qualitative, one-on-one, in-depth discussions with senior executives in the same industries across every region. The third is a separate, targeted banker survey of loan officers and branch managers, designed specifically to illuminate the complexities of both the official banking system and the shadow economy alongside it. One contemporary account recorded a single quarter's fieldwork as 2,187 interviews conducted over roughly three weeks.

The report that results from this fieldwork runs to about eighty pages and uses both quantitative and qualitative data to track real-time conditions regionally and within each of eight key industries in each region. The firm stresses that its data are often months, if not quarters, ahead of lagging official data. The structure — region crossed with sector — reflects a conviction, repeated by Miller in commentary, that there is no single Chinese economy to describe: conditions in export-oriented coastal manufacturing, in inland retail, in real estate and in services routinely diverge, and a national average can conceal more than it reveals. Early survey coverage illustrated exactly that divergence, with revenues at firms in central China rising faster than in the north, northeast and southwest in one quarter while revenues in export-centric Guangdong and in Beijing fell.

Credit and shadow banking

Among the survey's distinctive contributions is its treatment of credit. The China Beige Book has described itself as the first analytical report to use country-wide, independently collected data to track China's shadow banking universe, breaking down non-bank, unofficial lending rates not just nationally or by region but for each sector and sub-sector within each region, and by categories such as firm size and export or import concentration. That focus came from a judgement, articulated by Miller, that the credit environment — who is accessing capital, and at what cost — can matter even more than the headline growth environment for understanding the economy's fragility.

The labour market, wages and prices

The same granular approach applies to the labour market and to prices. The survey tracks employment, wages and inflation alongside growth, and its quarterly releases have repeatedly drawn attention to the gap between headline conditions and firms' actual behaviour: falling shares of firms applying for and receiving bank loans, private-sector firms largely excluded from parts of the credit market, capital spending slowing even when conditions were not deteriorating, and wage and price pressures reappearing in particular sectors. In one early release, the survey found retailers outpacing all other segments on revenue growth while warning that accelerating input and output prices and wages suggested a return of inflationary pressure, and that looser money combined with less corporate borrowing was, in Miller's phrase, not a good combination. These are the kinds of findings — firm-level, sector-specific and sometimes at odds with the prevailing narrative — on which the publication's reputation rests.

Coverage and readership

The China Beige Book's findings are routinely reported by Bloomberg, Reuters and other financial media, usually in the form of a summary of the quarterly survey released ahead of the full report, which is published for clients. That rhythm has made the publication a fixture of the financial news cycle on China: each quarter, its reading of growth, credit and hiring is set alongside official data and the forecasts of major banks, and divergences between the survey and the official figures become news in themselves. Miller is widely cited as an authority on China's economy, and the Hoover Institution's Liz Economy, introducing him in a published conversation, described the China Beige Book as having become, over some fifteen years, the go-to guide for anyone who wants to understand what is happening inside the Chinese economy in real time, while also noting its more recent monthly updates.

Its readership, as described in its own company profiles, spans the corporate and financial sectors and includes central banks. That audience explains the publication's tone and form. It is written for decision-makers who price risk, allocate capital or set policy, rather than for a general news audience, and its online presence at chinabeigebook.com functions primarily as the public face of a data business: explaining the survey, presenting its leadership and offering its reports and customised research to clients.

Place in China economic reporting

The China Beige Book occupies a specific niche among online publications about China. It does not compete with news agencies on breaking news, nor with academic journals on long-form research. Its contribution is measurement: a private, repeated, independently collected survey of the world's second-largest economy, maintained since 2012 and designed to be comparable across time, region and sector. In a field where information is contested and official data are frequently debated, that continuity is the product. Analysts quoted in coverage of the firm have praised its attempt to get to the bottom of developments in the labour market and to find better avenues of getting data from the ground up, sectioning the economy by region and sector and following credit and labour conditions together.

For readers of this directory, the essential facts are these. The China Beige Book is produced by China Beige Book International, founded in 2010 and based in New York. Its quarterly survey, modelled on the United States Federal Reserve's Beige Book, began in 2012 and is compiled from thousands of interviews with Chinese firms, executives and bankers through an independent in-country network. It tracks growth, employment, wages, inflation and credit, including shadow banking, by region and sector in a report of roughly eighty pages. Its co-founder and chief executive, Leland Miller, is among the most widely quoted independent commentators on the Chinese economy, and its findings are routinely carried by the world's leading financial news organisations.