Because humans are storytellers, not scientist by nature. Better (and not necessary for plebeians) story, bigger impact. For example religions or money have diminished our freedom-loving characteristics to almost none-existence, but they sure are good concepts to knit us together to form a society.

I was merely implying that I am not in the position to verify whether these are true or not, but domestic demand for goods in China dropped significantly during and after covid. The reason for this is highly speculated. China has also been reporting bloated population numbers, which cannot be true with the historical fertily numbers.

There has been rumours, that the chinese population has declined by hundreds of millions during covid. This also could be a contributing fact to the decline of domestic demand.