Fabricating data in QQ groups: how do local authorities in China fake their numbers?
This video explores how local Chinese governments falsify economic data by forcing companies to inflate their revenue and production capacity. Taking Shuangjiang County in Lincang, Yunnan; Hengshan County in Hunan; Yilan in Heilongjiang; and Nanping in Zhangzhou, Fujian as examples, it exposes how local statistics bureaus use QQ groups to issue inflated reporting targets, use fire safety inspections as a chokehold, and directly seize companies' reporting accounts to tamper with the data they submit.
Video link:
Full text:
Local governments hold companies down and demand that they inflate their revenue and production capacity. For instance, in January of this year, a central communiqué mentioned that Shuangjiang County in Lincang City — an underdeveloped county with a very backward industrial sector and a relatively small population — has a total of 34 industrial enterprises above designated size, and these 34 companies collectively overreported 3.5 billion yuan of output value for Shuangjiang County, meaning each company on average inflated its output value by 100 million yuan. These inflated figures may not look like much for all of China as a whole, but for Shuangjiang County they are staggering. After all, Shuangjiang County's total GDP for a whole year is only 9 billion yuan, and the entire county's industrial output value is only 4 billion yuan a year — so basically more than half of it was fabricated. As for how these officials coerce local companies into overreporting, the methods are all sorts of bizarre. For example, in the case of Hengshan County in Hunan that the CCP announced earlier, it was mentioned that
local statistics bureau staff would create a QQ group with all the private enterprises in the area, and then the statistics bureau staff would post the task targets they had drafted directly into the group, telling the companies in the group to report their output value and their amounts according to the targets they had made up. If a company does not report according to the standard, then all subsequent checks — such as fire safety inspections — will be failed without exception. In counties like Yilan in Heilongjiang and Nanping in Zhangzhou, Fujian, local officials are even more brazen: the local government will directly take over the accounts from these private enterprises, so that the companies no longer report for themselves; instead, government statistics staff fill in the companies' output value by hand and report it to the central authorities. At that point, how much a company actually produced this year is no longer up to the company to say — it is whatever the statistics bureau staff say.