The way to get ahead in China is to manipulate statistics
Mar 26th 2016 | SHANGHAI
IN THEORY Chinese officials receive promotions based on their performance
against a range of targets: delivering strong growth, maintaining social
stability and, until recently, enforcing the one-child policy. But scholars
debate whether the system really rewards those who excel according to these (in
any case flawed) metrics. Some believe the emphasis on merit is real, and helps
explain China s stunning economic progress over the past 35 years. Others
reckon that connections to the right leaders matter more for those trying to
advance their careers. New research, however, suggests a third option: that
those who get ahead are adept not at stimulating growth nor at currying favour,
but at cooking the books.
A recent paper from America s National Bureau of Economic Research uses
fertility rates as a way to test this theory. Economists have found a
relationship between GDP growth in an official s fiefdom and subsequent
promotion, but it is difficult to know how accurate the GDP figures are (a
question that haunts anyone following the Chinese economy). Population data are
different: in addition to the figures provided by local officials, China
conducts a census every ten years, revising population data all the way down to
the village level. That makes it possible to pinpoint where bureaucrats have
been fiddling the statistics.
Examining data on 967 mayors in 28 provinces from 1985 to 2000, Juan Carlos Su
rez Serrato and Xiao Yu Wang of Duke University and Shuang Zhang of University
of Colorado, Boulder, find that officials who claimed to have suppressed
population growth were rewarded. Mayors who reduced the local birth rate by one
child per 1,000 people per year by their own count had a 10% greater chance of
being promoted.
But the relationship between fertility rates and career trajectory disappears
when using the census data rather than the figures reported by the local
officials themselves. Mayors who received promotions were no better or worse at
curbing population growth than those who did not. The way to get ahead in the
Chinese bureaucracy, it seems, is to falsify statistics. It makes you wonder
what other data have been doctored.