What Eugine said. See I defy the data, which I summarize as:

If an experiment contradicts a theory, we are expected to throw out the theory, or else break the rules of Science. But this may not be the best inference. If the theory is solid, it's more likely that an experiment got something wrong than that all the confirmatory data for the theory was wrong. In that case, you should be ready to "defy the data", rejecting the experiment without coming up with a more specific problem with it; the scientific community should tolerate such defiances without social penalty, and reward those who correctly recognized the error if it fails to replicate. In no case should you try to rationalize how the theory really predicted the data after all.

Your models of the world must be consilient. If you find "growth" coinciding with "nothing new being built since before communists took over", then yes, you should "defy" the supposed growth data. If growth means anything, it means, "people don't risk death trying to float away because of poor opportunities". If you try to reinterpret the world so that such a circumstance "really" counts as growth, then you've fundamentally forgotten why you came up with that metric in the first place.

It is far more a case of "compartmentalization" to say that "except with respect to every on-the-ground observable, this country has high growth, because that's what their economic numbers say, and don't tell me about what you saw there, that's a separate, non-overlapping magisterium".

The "if data disagrees with my view so the data is wrong" reaction is exactly what I thought makes it a good litmus test.

No, this is a case of "the data fails to agree with observation and furthermore is in a field notorious for data manipulation and sometimes outright falsification, therefore the data is wrong with high probability".

Relying on "data" even when it blatantly contradicts direct observation, as you seem to insist on doing, is precisely the kind of straw rationality gives rationality in general a bad name and more importantly causes many rationalists to fail.