The restrictions—pushed by President Xi Jinping and top leaders—are leaving investors more in the dark than usual. “I just trade based on what people I know are talking about, particularly from inside the tech community,” said Beijing hair stylist Wu Ming, who trades Chinese stocks on his phone when traffic in his salon is slow.

“I don’t have any other sources to trust,” he said.

The trend toward less transparency goes beyond data for companies and the economy. “Many data series have been discontinued in recent years or subject to revisions that make past comparisons difficult, or produce simply implausible figures, said Christopher Beddor, Deputy Director of China Research at Gavekal Dragonomics. That includes tallies of rural structures, provincial fixed-asset investment amounts, death counts, and many more.

“The opacity certainly chips away at confidence. It means that investors need to apply a larger discount to asset prices in order to account for the greater uncertainty,” he told Barron’s.

The most visible was over the summer, as the youth unemployment rate leapt over 20%, when the statistics bureau simply stopped releasing the numbers. They recently resumed releasing the data with a revised methodology, but critics remain skeptical.

Last month, Xi nixed Premier Li Qiang’s press briefing at the annual parliamentary meeting. The press confab hasn’t been skipped in 30 years, so it was a rare withdrawal of a forum for investors to learn more about the country’s policy direction as the president continues to micromanage the world’s second-largest economy.

Li, China’s second-most-powerful leader, didn’t take questions, and won’t for the rest of its five-year term apart from “special circumstances,” official spokesperson Lou Qinjian said. The scrapping raised public scrutiny over the Communist Party restricting access to information.

Investors have long complained about not having enough concrete data to trade confidently. In 2023, the large-cap CSI 300 fell to its lowest level since 2019, and the benchmark Shanghai Composite hit its lowest point since 2019 on an intraday basis.

Behind the markets’ freefall and the increasing restriction of information, there was a flurry of policy movements. In August, China’s securities regulator unveiled a package of measures aimed at reviving sentiment, including proposals to cut trading costs, support share buybacks, and encourage long-term investment.

Over the next few months, China halved the stamp duty on stock trading, the securities regulator tightened scrutiny over program trading, and dozens of listed companies unveiled share buyback and purchase plans, presumably heeding Beijing’s call for market support.

Next came the Beijing Exchange’s banning of major shareholders in listed firms from selling stock in November, and China’s cabinet injecting funds into the capital market in January. Regulators also placed increasing restrictions on lending and borrowing shares, and the central bank eased monetary policy.

The dribble of data continued, and the policies didn’t cause a market correction until February, when a trend started an upswing that has now seemed to have plateaued.

“With concerns over official data quality and availability continuing to rise, it’s more important than ever not to simply swallow the government story,” Leland Miller, CEO of China Beige Book, told Barron’s. “Ever since China’s slowdown started to accelerate meaningfully, getting an honest look at economic conditions was always destined to get harder. Just as the costs for investors of getting the story wrong have multiplied.”

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