Adam asked:
The People’s Republic of China is listed at a population of 1.3 billion and a GDP of 7.9 trillion USD.
The People’s Republic of China is listed at a population of 1.3 billion and a GDP of 7.9 trillion USD.
How does the outside world know that these numbers, or others like them, are accurate? There are certainly many reasons that a country may be motivated to tweak these figures.
Compared to other nations, the PRC is somewhat “closed” and opaque, with a relatively high level of secrecy. So how does the rest of the world know the level of validity and reliability of these statistics?
Claudia
A great question, I must say.
Someone rightly said that statistics can be used to prove anything and no one has been able to use this powerful tool as brilliantly as the Communist government in China.
Mostly other nations try to compare those statistics which concern both the nations, like trade surplus. The communist government in China is in a habit of reporting lower figure of trade surplus and this makes everyone suspicious.
There are human rights abuses as well. CCP tries to downplay the atrocities on civilians by manipulating the figures, but the human rights activists provide figures which point out that they are grossly under-reporting the actual figures.
It’s all based on suspicion. No outside independent body can carry out the work of collecting stats within PRC. At the best they try to work out through unofficial covert channels. The killing of Tibetans and Uyghurs around olympics was under-reported, the victims of melamine milk were under-reported. No one relies on the data that CCP shells out actually. They always use the unofficial and covert channels to work out the true measure of stats.
Comment by Daniel v 8.33 — January 12, 2009 @ 8:50 am
Its not…..
Not very one reports the birth of there second child due to the one child polity and its fines.
As China is a vast country not very little village, town etc is recorded.
And even there China’s official statistics agency has doults on how accurate it is
Comment by Mr Hex Vision — January 14, 2009 @ 2:38 pm
If you believe it, it is true, if you dont believe it , it is fake.
I heard of this several year ago: that even chinese premier suspected numbers he collected from each region.
Comment by liyuwc12321 — January 14, 2009 @ 9:02 pm
go you mean when Washington Post writes there were 15 students killed in the uni shooting we should immediately think there were 115 instead?…
i always suspected that, just never said it aloud
i don’t see what difference it makes for you personally if it 1.3 billion or 3.1 billion population in China and that’s not because i’m somehow blind but because i’ve been to China for a while and i know what i’m talking about…
the rest of the world should mind their own business and don’t stick to Chinese internal matters…
no need to teach Chinese how they must live in their own country, because, as it is obvious from the constant progress, they know it very well…
Comment by Elena S — January 15, 2009 @ 7:15 pm