Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts: China’s Evolving State Capitalism

• In Event: The Economy Under Autocracy: New Research Directions

Abstract

Numbers came to define Chinese politics, until they did not count what mattered and what they counted did not measure up. Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts argues that a focus on quantification goes beyond describing a changing China but posits a theory for why that change is taking place and where it is headed. This paper, which draws from chapter six, shows how debts, pollution, corruption, and falsification accumulated over time and especially from the stimulus response to the global financial crisis as externalities of the system of limited quantified vision. The center’s focus on a few statistical quantities left room for enterprising individuals to hide facts for their own benefit. Risky loans funded short-term investments to meet performance targets by leaders who left broken balance sheets in their wake. Corruption grew from merely pervasive to market-distorting. In China’s cities, who and what was counted lead to the striking presence of slums amidst ghost cities. The tyranny of numbers is also seen in the contrasting tales of two environmental indicators, the failed Green GDP and the successful PM 2.5, which worked rhetorically as a simple metric that captured public attention and galvanized government action. Officials falsified data, ‘juking the stats’ by which they were judged by Beijing. Statistical analyses demonstrate that GDP jumped during politically significant moments more than other less politically sensitive measures indicated. Citizens, too, took advantage of the regime’s limited vision and manipulated data to their own benefit, as seen in examples of strategic divorces, missing women, and “growing houses.”

Author

• Jeremy L. Wallace, Cornell University