How They Hid The Economic Collapse of China (A 40% Collapse in Months)

China just cut oil consumption by a staggering amount — and almost no one is talking about it.

In this episode of Based Camp, Malcolm and Simone break down the data showing China was responsible for ~74% of the entire global decline in crude oil imports during the recent Iran conflict. Seaborne imports down ~40%. Refining runs crushed. Oil prices that should have spiked instead collapsed back toward pre-war levels the moment a temporary peace deal was signed.

Official explanations (strategic reserves, EV adoption, buyer strikes, commercial margins, Taiwan blockade drills) don’t hold up under scrutiny. The numbers point to something far more serious: China has likely been artificially propping up oil demand for years to hide a deeper economic collapse — real estate crash, capital flight, post-COVID manufacturing flight, and extreme power consolidation under Xi.

We also get into the Li Keqiang Index, the secret CCP coup you weren’t told about, capital flight into Western housing markets, dystopian Chinese creator culture (cute car-living girls and bridge livestream farms), and why the patterns look a lot more like systemic weakness than clever strategy.

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Malcolm Collins: Hello, Symone. I’m excited to be here with you today. World-changing, civilization-changing information has dropped, and no one is talking about it. And so we need to talk about it for our fans here, because at least they can be informed about- I’m gonna... Y’all, guys, guys, guys, you think I am overstating things here, so I’ll just go through the data we’re gonna be looking at real quick.

[00:00:24] And if you have an understanding of economics, you’re gonna immediately be like, “What?” happening. So, throughout the course of the war oil, gas prices didn’t really go up that much.

[00:00:37] Simone Collins: The I- the Iran war?

[00:00:38] Malcolm Collins: The Iran war. Okay. And, and now when, when the, they had the brief peace they were actually at a rate that around what they were at the beginning of the war.

[00:00:46] Okay. And we’ll go over the prices, but that’s kind of crazy given that oil’s still not coming through the Strait of Hormuz. Now, what a lot of people are saying, because they want to dunk on Trump without actually knowing, like, globally, geopolitically what’s going on, they go, “Oh, well, this is because the US released their strategic reserves.”

[00:01:06] The reality of the situation is that, that the US releasing its strategic reserves really did not impact the situation that much at all. What actually was the big impact on this situation was China reducing the oil that they are consuming. In fact, 74% of the entire global decline in crude oil imports and trade came just from China consuming less.

[00:01:34] All right? The, the amount less that China is consuming has been larger than, and dramatically larger than, the impact of the US, all of Europe, and Japan releasing their strategic reserves combined.

[00:01:52] Simone Collins: How sudden or gradual has this been? ‘Cause I know China’s been investing heavily in solar. Is that what’s going on maybe in renewables?

[00:02:00] Malcolm Collins: Not at all. No. So the, their, their solar investments have been major. Now around 50% of the cars sold in China are electric- Yeah ... which is pretty crazy. But that accounts for a r- around 2% reduction in the amount of oil they use every year historically. What?

[00:02:15] Simone Collins: Oh,

[00:02:15] Malcolm Collins: my-

[00:02:15] So-

[00:02:15] Simone Collins: I mean, I th- man, oh, I thought that would be way more significant.

[00:02:18] What’s the point of electric cars if that’s all that they do?

[00:02:22] Malcolm Collins: That’s, that’s where China’s... Well, I mean, keep in mind, it’s been happening for a while at this point, but we’re talking about something that happened over the course of a few months. Now, what you

[00:02:29] Simone Collins: could say- Right. So w- okay, you are saying this is very sudden, this like, it was like this and then went like this.

[00:02:35] Malcolm Collins: Mm-hmm.

[00:02:35] Simone Collins: Okay.

[00:02:36] Malcolm Collins: Now what you could say is, “Well, this must be because China released or is using a lot of their strategic reserves as well.” But this would also be wrong. Over the first few months of the war, actually China continued to stockpile more into their strategic reserves.

[00:02:54] Simone Collins: Implying they didn’t have demand.

[00:02:57] Malcolm Collins: Yes, which we’re gonna get to. But then now they are using some of their strategic reserves, but it’s not, like, a huge amount. It doesn’t account for a huge amount of this. And on top of all of this China’s seaborne imports, if you’re like, “What does this mean for China? How much less oil are they bringing in?”

[00:03:13] Mm. Have reduced by 40%. And I will note here that the actual decline in demand appears to be bigger than that. Specifically, if we’re looking at all of the oil, both domestic and foreign oil, and we’re looking at their refining capacity, it has

[00:03:36] Almost a, a 40% reduction there as well. So we’re just seeing significantly less oil being consumed or planned to be consumed in the near future. Whew. Now, if this is all confusing to you, I’ve got to pull this up

[00:03:55] Simone Collins: You gonna show me a graph? This is gonna help, like, ‘cause I, it’s, it’s really hard for me to, like, wrap my head around [00:04:00] this

[00:04:04] Malcolm Collins: So historically, when we were looking at China, like when economists were looking at China, because China always lies about its data or when it’s not lying, it doesn’t release it. Like in 2023, for the first time, they stopped releasing youth unemployment statistics, and they haven’t released it since.

[00:04:18] And if China’s not releasing something, it probably looks catastrophically bad. And so the way that we historically attempted to judge how the Chinese economy was doing was something called the Li Keqiang Index. And what it looked at was electricity consumption, rail and fain- freight volumes, and bank loan gross.

[00:04:39] And this is something we also do when we’re trying to determine the economic state of places like North Korea that are also the fuzzy with the amount of data that they put out. What this means for China It’s for a long time everyone’s like, “Didn’t China’s, like, real estate industry completely collapse?”

[00:04:57] And that was like 70% of personal savings in China, and one of the biggest asset classes in China. Why didn’t their economy collapse? It’s been a big mystery for a lot of people. Why doesn’t it look like the Chinese economy collapsed? And I think the answer here that I’m gonna put is, the key word in that is why doesn’t it look like they collapsed?

[00:05:19] So China really hates looking bad. They really hate looking weak. All right?

[00:05:25] Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah. They, they can’t look like they’re losing ever.

[00:05:28] Malcolm Collins: And and they know that one of the core ways that the West judges how their economy is doing is their oil consumption. So suppose their economy had actually almost completely collapsed over the past few years.

[00:05:45] Simone Collins: Yeah.

[00:05:46] Malcolm Collins: And as a result, the government didn’t want anyone to know. What was one of the key things that they would have to do? They would h