China Briefing | Here’s how to beat fake data about the Chinese economy
The scale of falsification by local bureaucrats has become a major international embarrassment to China – it’s time to send in the graft-busters
Falsifying or padding out data has been refined to an art form among China’s local bureaucrats, since good economic growth figures not only look and feel good but are benchmarks for their career advancement.
This has given rise to a popular saying that “data makes an official and an official makes data”. The malpractice is so rampant and blatant that over the years, a long-running joke is that simply adding up the figures from all the provinces and municipalities reveals a sum that overshoots the national GDP – by 6.1 trillion yuan (more than 10 per cent!) in 2013, 4.78 trillion yuan in 2014, and 3.6 trillion yuan in 2016.
The scale of data falsification has become a major international embarrassment for the Chinese government and puts a serious dent in its credibility as its economy moves towards becoming the world’s largest in the next decade.
The central government has readily admitted the problem, but its annual promises of a crackdown sound hollow at best as local officials become more creative and innovative at faking data.
So it came as a pleasant surprise that since last year, two provinces and one municipality have volunteered to police fake data and revise down their revenues significantly.