Louise Lief's Blogs
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Lying with Statistics
One of the major challenges in China is figuring out what is actually going on. A key problem is that the vast majority of Chinese statistics are suspect. Take, for example, China’s poverty rate. How many poor people are there in China? Depending on how you look at it, China’s poverty rate is either 36.3 percent (those earning less than $2 a day), 15.9 percent (those earning less than $1.25 a day, the World Bank’s official definition of poverty) or 2.8 percent, China’s national poverty line. The first two statistics are from the World Bank. The last is the Chinese government’s figure. The Chinese government’s definition of poverty is earning 48 cents a day or less. The theory is that 48 cents buys more in China than elsewhere in the world. In contrast, 13.2 percent of Americans live in poverty according...
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The Law of Unintended Consequences
The Chinese state excels at keeping tabs on its population, stifling dissent and imposing its will. But as became clear throughout our visit, millions of Chinese are also remarkably inventive at subverting the many regulations that govern their lives. “The policies come from above, the way around them comes from below,” goes an old Chinese saying still very much in use today. Because so many laws are imposed from above, applicable to some but not the well connected, many people have no compunction about trying to circumvent them. Says June Mei, our interpreter, “You have 500 million people trying to game the system. The Chinese government’s efforts to implement policies, even laudable ones like pollution controls and mine safety, continually bump up against this reality. When the government issued a ruling that provincial officials would also be judged on their ability...
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