Why Chinese officials are suddenly coming clean over cooking the books
Government move to ‘sustainable growth’ rather than chasing higher GDP figures may have curbed local governments’ desire to produce inflated figures
The Binhai New Area in the northern Chinese city of Tianjin – an economic zone that sparked talk of grand ambitions to create China’s answer to Manhattan from a riverside swamp – raised eyebrows this month when it announced that its GDP growth in 2016 was a third smaller than it previously stated.
Tianjin’s official radio network reported on its social media account last week that the area’s GDP was 665.4 billion yuan (US$103 billion) after statistical “adjustments”. That is about a third smaller than the 1 trillion yuan previously stated by local officials for 2016.
The post was deleted a few hours later, but a number of official media, including People’s Daily, confirmed the change. An official from the Tianjin statistics bureau declined to elaborate on the changes when contacted by the South China Morning Post.
Binhai is not alone in inflating its economic data. Inner Mongolia’s government said a few days earlier that about 40 per cent of the region’s reported industrial output in 2016, as well as 26 per cent of reported fiscal revenues, did not exist.
China’s rust-belt province of Liaoning, meanwhile, admitted last year that local GDP numbers from 2011 to 2014 had been inflated artificially by about 20 per cent.
