Winston Smith, the protagonist of George Orwell’s 1984, spends his days as an employee at the Ministry of Truth adjusting documents to conform to the fluctuating political needs of Big Brother’s regime. “Who controls the past controls the future, who controls the present controls the past,” Orwell wrote, drawing a connection between a government’s ability to influence what the public perceives as the truth and that government’s political survival. Although he leaned to the political left, Orwell was deeply wary of the tyranny coalescing in the Soviet Union, which sought to bend reality to its needs. Joseph Stalin had a penchant for manipulating photographs, airbrushing out figures whom he had purged. He also wanted to rule untrammeled over the field of official statistics. Stalin had the bureaucrats in charge of the 1937 census arrested and executed after their findings displeased him; the initial results suggested that the Soviet population had not grown as much as expected in the preceding years, mostly as a result of the 1932–33 famine caused by Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture.To get more latest news about china economy, you can visit shine news official website.
Governments of all stripes remain preoccupied by such statistics, and many leaders feel compelled to cook the books. In a December 2022 address, Chinese President Xi Jinping claimed that his country’s GDP was expected to exceed 120 trillion yuan ($17 trillion, around $6 trillion less than that of the United States) for the year. If true, this figure implied an annual growth rate for the economy of approximately 4.4 percent, much higher than the 3.3 percent growth rate that independent forecasters had expected. It also suggested that the Chinese economy is well on its way to matching its American counterpart, at least in absolute terms, and could overtake the U.S. economy in as little as a decade. Such a feat would be the culmination of what is already the greatest economic success story of recent times and would further increase China’s geopolitical heft.
But there is good reason to doubt the magnitude of Beijing’s economic achievements. The Chinese government and those of other autocracies are especially prone to inflating statistics regarding their performance. Of course, leaders in democracies try to burnish their records in all sorts of cynical and even deceitful ways, but their statements tend to face greater scrutiny and resistance. Autocrats can lie much more easily. My research, which parses satellite images of night-time lights in order to provide a more accurate measure of economic activity, finds that autocracies habitually overstate their economic success. China’s GDP growth, in truth, is not as high as its leaders insist, and the country is not as close to catching up with the United States as is commonly presumed.
China’s statistics have long inspired doubt. Academics have debated for years whether the numbers produced by the Chinese government on topics as diverse as air pollution and workplace safety should be trusted. Beijing’s decision to abruptly end its strict zero-COVID policies at the end of 2022 prompted questions about the credibility of its official COVID-19 mortality figures, which remained impossibly low.
When it comes to GDP figures, there are good reasons to be skeptical. Chinese local officials produce data on economic growth within their jurisdictions, which central authorities then weigh in decisions about whether to promote those same local officials. The inextricably politicized nature of these figures has forced many leaders to take them with a pinch of salt. The unreliability of some of China’s official economic statistics seems to be an open secret among high-ranking officials, as evidenced by former Premier Li Keqiang’s acknowledgment in 2007 that railway cargo volume, electricity consumption, and loan disbursements were more credible measures of economic activity than blunt GDP figures. To be sure, this impulse to manipulate official records to paint a rosy picture is not exclusive to nondemocracies. In the early 2000s, several member states of the European Union engaged in creative accounting in order to artificially comply with supranational fiscal rules. At the end of the same decade, inflation measured through online prices in Argentina was three times larger than the official estimates, a discrepancy that was not observed for other large economies in Latin America. In Colombia, the head of the National Statistical Agency resigned in 2004 amid allegations that he had been pressured by the government of then President Alvaro Uribe not to release the results of a survey on security perceptions, a sensitive topic for a government centered on law and order.
There are, however, several important differences between the distortions that occur in democracies and those that occur in autocracies. Democracies tend to allow public officials to speak up against the government without fear of reprisals and, more generally, create an environment that facilitates scrutiny and accountability. Officials in democracies and autocracies may both have incentives to overstate government performance, but leaders in democracies have a harder time getting away with it. A well-functioning system of checks and balances allows for the examination of official statistics by political opponents, judicial institutions, the news media, and the public at large. Moreover, the protection of basic civil liberties facilitates the publicization of evidence of misreporting.
These institutional constraints are largely absent in authoritarian regimes, which allow for greater control and manipulation of information. As the economist Sergei Guriev and the political scientist Daniel Treisman argue in Spin Dictators, the desire and capacity to manipulate information is the defining feature of present-day autocrats. For instance, the Soviet government initially denied the catastrophic nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986 and admitted the magnitude of the disaster only when radioactivity measures skyrocketed in other countries. In recent times, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan have put a tight muzzle on all news media in their countries. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government has engaged in a massive misinformation campaign regarding its invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
