The Chinese statistics bureau reported last week that unemployment among the 16- to 24-year-old demographic was 14.9 percent in December.

This would be a considerable improvement over the 21.3 percent reported for that age bracket last June, compared to 5.2 percent for the general population.

Does this paint a rosier picture for the over 11 million university students expected to graduate this year?

Not so fast, said Elliott Fan, graduate director of National Taiwan University’s Department of Economics. “The decline [in unemployment] was caused by China’s National Statistics Bureau removing students from the sample, not because of any solid improvement in the youth’s labor market,” he told Newsweek Friday.

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The biggest beneficiary of the new reporting methodology is the Chinese Communist Party leadership, Steve Tsang, director of SOAS University of London’s China Institute, told Newsweek Friday.

The new statistics “support the Party’s narrative of China’s economy and society, and thus unite the country to pursue the ‘China Dream’ as Xi directs,” Tsang said.

Yet, “Just making statistics more patriotic will not help the economy to recover its lost momentum,” he added.