Lying with Statistics
By Louise Lief | August 16, 2011 | China
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 to the US poverty line. 468 million of China’s 1.3 billion people earn less than $2 a day, but by China’s definition, they’re not poor.
Like poverty, whenever possible pollution has also been defined out of existence. One day we woke up in Beijing to dirty, yellowish smog that hid the sun and obscured buildings two blocks away. Pollution that day was considered within “acceptable” limits.
These statistical acrobatics prevent China from addressing some of its most pressing problems. According to the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics, about 700 million Chinese live in rural areas, and 600 million live in urban areas. This statistic, however, does not take into account the 100-250 million migrants (that range is a rough estimate) from the countryside working in urban areas but registered as rural residents. These hundreds of millions of migrants live and work in the cities, but their educational and health benefits are provided only in their official place of residence.
Omissions can also lead to a distortion of the source of China’s problems. Until this year, industries were considered China’s worst water polluters, mainly because no one had tallied pollution from agricultural sources. In 2010 shortly before our visit, Chinese scientists came up with a figure for pollution from fertilizer, pesticides and animal waste for the first time, demonstrating that agriculture was a far worse water polluter than industry.
This is not a new phenomenon. China has been run by a strong central government for a very long time, well before the Communists came into power 60 years ago. Everyone reporting to the center wants to look good.
So, one can’t help but wonder what else is being swept under the rug. The number of HIV/AIDS cases in China has remained suspiciously stable at 700,000, or less than .1 percent of the population for many years, even though private localized surveys show that socially marginalized populations of migrant workers, drug users, sex workers, some minority populations and the largely hidden gay population in many cities have double digit infection rates. By comparison, the US, with less than one third of China’s population, has almost 1.2 million people living with HIV/AIDS, and a prevalence rate of .6 percent. Underreporting bad health news in China has been a big area of concern. In 2002-2003, the SARS virus pandemic was underreported for many months, contributing to its global spread.
Louise Lief, deputy director at the International Reporting Project (IRP), traveled with a group of U.S. editors and producers during the 2010 IRP Gatekeeper Trip to China.
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