Laowiseass - 9.5 percent economic growth: a political statistic

A couple hundred journalists watch, listen and take notes in head-shaking awe at quarterly press conferences where the State Statistics Bureau announces that despite sober predictions by professional economists, China's economy again grew at 9-plus percent over the past three, six or 12 months. Last Wednesday they announced 9.5 percent growth for the first half of 2005. Economists were expecting something like 8.5 percent.
All sectors did well, the bureau spokesman says after handing out math-defying statements that reporters elbow one another in the faces to obtain. Everything from poor farmers to the education service sector made money, imports and exports were up, another giant dollop of foreign investment. When you write the story later, to vary your language you keep reinventing words for "increase," i.e. rise, grow, soar, surge, penetrate the rosy clouds and keep going.
Also last Wednesday, after the press conference, an economist came forward and said what journalists have suspected all along but can't prove. This guy, the chief economist with the Asian Development Bank (the region's charitable lender) in Beijing, said China does not do sampling for its economic data, rather it simply uses reports from the departments of commerce, agriculture and other sectors, departments that in turn use data from local governments. A Chinese government agency submitting a performance report to the agency above it is like the statistics bureau giving reports to reporters: everything needs to look good, reality notwithstanding. This is how the famine of 1961 got started --local governments told Mao Zedong they had enough grain so don't worry, which Mao didn't.
So when the statistics bureau says farmers' income went up 12 percent this first half year, compared to the first half of 2004, to an average of something like 1,600 yuan, we should assume the bureau based this figure on reports from township officials or the agricultural ministry. For truth seekers, it pays to ask a few farmers what's happening to their income.