Written by Kuzma Gu
The National Bureau of Statistics of China (NBS) has been the official statistical agency of China since 1949. With regards to China’s unique political environment, the credibility of NBS, unlike the statistics bureaus of other countries, has always been questioned. Nevertheless, Rome wasn’t built in one day, so was the depravity of NBS.
Right after the establishment of People’s Republic of China on October 1st 1949, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) introduced the first ‘statistical department’ in the National People’s Congress – this was China’s first unified system of national accounts, the prototype of NBS, and it was under control of Financial Affairs Committee of China. Looking back to the history of China, the time between 1949 and 1958 was for sure to be one of the most peaceful periods. Politically, China established diplomatic relations with some nearby countries and built up infrastructure from the beginning. In such sunshine, NBS makes progress constantly on the planned economy with the lead of Muqiao, Xue.
(1958-1961: The Great Leap Forward)
The CCP’s most famous statistical distortion was perhaps during Mao’s Great Leap Forward campaign (1958-1961), when provincial officials insisted on keeping their granaries full to show the harvest surplus supposedly brought about by miraculous communal farming techniques. Sadly, withholding food during years of poor harvests (due to both lack of rain and Mao’s mad programs) caused a famine leading to the deaths of tens of millions of people. In such harsh conditions, finding a way to live is already hard; the NBS was utterly forgotten. Whether inventing a surplus or hiding the deaths of millions, party officials high and low showed no compunction about fabricating their statistics. (Lowson)
(1961-2000: Wild reform and progress of NBS and prototype of incorrect data)
(Iacob) The Chinese government has implemented a series of reforms since the 1980s. In terms of data gathering, the NBS moved from an “all-comprehensive reporting system marred with guesstimates for an increasing share of industry to a two-class data compilation system. In parallel, the government became more open. The publication of the first statistics yearbook in 1982 signaled the beginning of a relaxation of secrecy, and was followed by a “deluge of yearbooks, census materials, surveys, and internet publications”. NBS began to compile tertiary sector and aggregate production GDP stats in 1985, and Input-output tables were first published for the whole economy in 1987, allowing scholars to better devise their own alternative estimates of GDP growth.
For better estimates of GDP, NBS reformed the direct reporting system by introducing a minimum threshold in 1998 to ensure that only firms with large annual revenue would participate. But for the rest of the economy, the NBS increasingly relied on surveys and censuses. Prior to the 1990s, China made limited experiments with these methods, but in the 1996 revision of China’s Statistics Law, surveys and censuses were codified for the first time as the primary method of data gathering in China. (Iacob)
However, in a country like China, where bureaucratism is deep into the bone, there is no chance that the local government reports the precise number to the national institution. Unlike the US and most other countries, Chinese officials have no legal obligation to disclose their salary to the public; this partially causes corruption inside the Chinese government while also making the salaries for a massive group of people unclear to the public.
The government also began to do a better job of measuring and presenting the data it gathered. In 1995, Beijing fully adopted the international System of National Accounting (SNA), which is designed to measure indicators of relevance to a market economy. Two years later, the NBS placed statistics on more solid legal footing by codifying methods to calculate and present GDP to the public. It also developed better techniques to impute statistics based on limited sample data. The most recent reform in this regard was a seasonally adjusted measure of quarterly GDP growth, introduced in 2011. (Iacob)
(2000-present: The diminishing credibility of NBS and the centralism in China)
As China’s government started to lean towards centralism after entering the 21st century, the credibility of NBS’ statistics became continuously more doubting as NBS’s main goal turned out to be solidifying the stateliness of the president. (Iacob) One strong proof that the CPI of China is suspicious is its correlation with the implicit GDP deflator. In the first half of 2012, the GDP deflator was 3.2 percent versus CPI of 3.3 percent. While this matched nicely, in 2010, the GDP deflator was twice as high as the CPI. (Iacob)
NBS is criticized for its approach to essential economic factors as well. For example, China continues to rely on value added by industry as the primary measure of GDP. This measurement adds up the net output of agriculture, industry, and services, focusing on what the economy supplies rather than what it consumes. Most advanced economies, including the United States, prefer the expenditure measure of GDP, which adds up consumption, gross capital formation, and net exports. Most economists consider the latter measure to be superior, because it represents what comes out of the economy that is actually used by citizens, business, government, and the rest of the world.(Iacob)
Elected as president in 2013, Xi is and will still be president of China till today, 2023. In order to solidify his authority and stay as president, Xi made lots of efforts, including conniving corruption, faking statistical numbers, and nationalizing all the media companies. In such a way, without an independent source, all the countries except the Chinese themselves have no way to tell the actual condition of China. (Guilford)
Moreover, the NBS does publish expenditure GDP on an annual basis, but only partially. It does not publish inflation-adjusted real GDP growth based on expenditure accounts, nor does it provide expenditure account GDP on a quarterly basis. Consequently, many economists come up with their own erroneous guesstimates. Some critics also suspect that the expenditure figure is adjusted only after the value-added GDP calculation has been done, so that expenditure GDP is arbitrarily adjusted to match the official value-added figure.(Iacob)
The best impression of NBS to the world might be its tight relativity with China’s political environment, and its confidentiality for data in many fields. Due to this reason, China’s credibility is under challenge internationally in this internet era, and the world is hoping the NBS will take genuine responsibility for its published data in the future.
Works Cited
Guilford, G. (2015, October 30). The most egregious examples from the Chinese government’s long, sordid history of data-doctoring. Quartz. Retrieved January 20, 2023, from https://qz.com/530096/china-data-tricks
Iacob N. Koch-Wese.(2013.1.28). The reliability of China – USCC.GOV. (n.d.). Retrieved January 21, 2023, from https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Research/TheReliabilityofChina%27sEconomicData.pdf
Lowsen, B. (2022, March 1). How reliable are China’s statistics? – The Diplomat. Retrieved January 20, 2023, from https://thediplomat.com/2022/03/how-reliable-are-chinas-statistics/
Yi.(2021.4.27).【学党史 话统计】国家统计局的“前世今生“（上）_工作. _工作. (2021, April 27). Retrieved January 20, 2023, from https://www.sohu.com/a/463252040_120034348