Rather than a conspiracy, I think it is more of a case of a blind man feeling an elephant. A labor shortage does exist in some of the top tier cities for low paying position that fewer and fewer people are interested in, in every other sector however there are still unemployment challenges. The single most important reason why China needs to maintain high growth is because the economy needs to absorb millions of new graduates every year. Otherwise if the labor pool is stabilized or even on the decline, then a comfortable 4% growth will be suffice allowing the nation to fix some of the restructuring issue and other unintended consequence of extreme high growth of the past few decades.
