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".