Similar types of statistics, in both absolute and relative terms, are available for provinces and lower administrative levels. Some data on telecommunications in rural areas also exist.

Agriculture

At the national level, with the exception of total grain output for which official estimates have been published in terms of tons or catties, only relative figures are available for the output of a few individual grain and cash crops. For some other crops only general indications are given as to whether their output rose or declined without any numerical information. For most crops even such indications are not shown.

Data on crop acreage, irrigated area, and afforested area, to the extent that they have been released, are given in the form of relative changes over time or annual increments. Available livestock data include relative numbers for draught animals, pigs, sheep and goats. Some percentages can be found for the output of aquatic products, the gross value of agricultural subsidiary output, and the gross value of total agricultural output.

At the provincial and lower levels, agricultural data are much more. plentiful. They are more frequently shown in absolute terms, and in greater variety than agricultural statistics at the national level. Included in local data are also such items as crop yield per unit of land, the number of water conservancy projects, increases in farm land, the size of rural labor force participating in farm construction work, and the number of communes.

Finance and Trade

A variety of percentages are available for certain financial and commercial indicators including state investment in provinces, agricultural taxes, state appropriations in support of agriculture, increases in rural income, wages, agricultural loan, bank savings, state purchases and retail sales of selected products, commodity prices, social purchasing power, and foreign trade. Absolute figures may be found for certain years for the prices of certain products such as flour, rice, pork, and vegetables, and for the export of rice and the import of other cereals.

As for other sectors, statistics for finance and trade become more abundant and varied at more disaggregated levels. It may be interesting to note that in contrast to the 1950's, some statistics on the foreign trade of certain regions, particularly those on the export trade of a few provinces and lower administrative areas, have become available in recent years.

In addition to the above sectoral statistics, there exist some data at local levels on population, medical services, school enrollment, and other health, educational and cultural services.

While the PRC appears to have partially lifted restrictions of its publication policy with respect to statistical information since 1970, many types of data which were published in the 1950's still remain unavailable. Certain types of data, such as most of the industrial and agricultural output figures, which previously were available in absolute terms, either have been made known only in relative terms or have been totally withheld. Other types of data, which the Chinese were

free to release during the 1950's, have been excluded from publication; among them the following are the most important: (1) national income and its components; (2) fixed assets and working capital; (3) state and provincial budgets; (4) technological coefficients for industrial products; (5) price and cost-of-living indexes; (6) labor force, labor productivity, and money and real wages; and (7) distribution of population by age, by sex, and by rural and urban areas.

IV. RELIABILITY OF CHINESE STATISTICS

Questions have frequently been raised about the credibility of Chinese statistics that have been released thus far by the People's Republic. How reliable are published Chinese statistics? Do the Chinese attempt to fabricate statistics for propaganda purposes? Answers to these questions are of fundamental importance, for if Chinese statistics are not sufficiently credible, research on the PRC economy would become almost impossible.

The quality of Chinese statistics has been discussed by a number of writers.13 The general consensus is that while Chinese statistics suffer from many deficiencies, deliberate falsification is not practiced by the central authorities. Such belief is in part based on a high degree of internal consistency of published Chinese statistics.

Several attempts have been made to check the consistency between aggregate and disaggregated data published in the 1950's. Ronald Hsia finds no wide discrepancies between total purchases of agricultural products by the state and state purchases of individual agricultural products. A study of Kang Chao indicates a close relation between output of various industrial products and their technological coefficients and factor inputs.15 K. C. Yeh in his study of Chinese petroleum industry concludes that "by and large, the output figures are consistent with the available information on capacity." 16 A systematic and detailed check of certain types of published Chinese data by Dwight Perkins shows "a considerable degree of consistency between raw price data and various price indexes, between data of grain purchases and sales in both calendar and grain years, and, finally, between price data, tax rates, tax revenue, and industrial production statistics."

99 17

The findings of three recent studies on the PRC economy are most illuminating. Field, Lardy, and Emerson, in their attempt at reconstructing the gross value of industrial output by province, find an

13 For a discussion of the quality of Chinese statistics published in the 1950's see Kang Chao, The Rate and Pattern of Industrial Growth in Communist China, Ann Arbor: Univer sity of Michigan Press, 1965; Alexander Eckstein, The National Income of Communist China, New York: Free Press, 1961, and Communist China's Economic Growth and Foreign Trade, New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co.. 1966; Choh-ming Li. The Statistical System of Communist China, Berkely: University of California Press, 1962; Ta-Chung Liu and Kung-chia Yeh, The Economy of the Chinese Mainland: National Income and Economic Development, 1933-1959, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965; and Dwight H. Perkins, Market Control and Planning in Communist China, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966. Some comments on the quality of Chinese statistics published in more recent years may be found in Leo A. Orleans. "Chinese Statistics: The Impossible Dream." The American Statistician, vol. 28, No. 2, May 1974. pp. 47-52; and Thomas A. Rawski, "Measuring China's Industrial Performance, 1949-73." a paper presented at the Conference on Reconciling Quantitative Measures of China's Economic Output, Washington, D.C., Jan. 17-18, 1975.

14 Ronald Hsia, Agricultural Output in Mainland China, cited in Dwight Perkins, op. cit., p. 220.

15 Kang Chao, op. cit., pp. 50-75.

10 K. C. Yeh, Communist China's Petroleum Situation, Santa Monica, Calif.: The Rand Corporation, RM-3160-PR, May 1962, p. 1.

17 Perkins, op. cit., quotation on p. 220.

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extremely close correspondence between the sum of provincial totals of the gross value of industrial output, pieced together from a large number of sources, and the reported national totals for 1952 and 1957.18 Thomas Rawski's study of the measures of China's industrial performance indicates that for the years 1952-57 close agreement exists between the official statistics of aggregate gross value and independent series constructed from commodity and price data.19 Examining Chinese agricultural statistics at both national and provincial levels Thomas Wiens demonstrates that "Chinese statistics for the 1949-57 period are on the whole internally consistent to the extent that we can disaggregate and that they are also reconcilable with statistics from the Republican Period." 20

Aggregative data published in recent years also have been found generally consistent with their components. In a recent study of China's petroleum industry Chu-yuan Cheng compares official estimates of the total output of crude oil with the output estimates for various oil fields, and concludes that "from cross checks, backward and forward derivations, it appears that most official data (on crude oil output) are consistent." 21 Field, Lardy, and Emerson find the official claim that the gross value of industrial output for the nation in 1971 was 21 times that in 1949 consistent with the provincial figures derived from scattered reports.22 This finding was supported by that of Rawski. His estimate of the gross value of industrial output for 1971, constructed from sectoral data including a wide range of industrial commodity estimates, agrees closely with the estimate derived from the official claim regarding overall industrial performance in that year.23 My own checks also show no major divergence between the percentage increase in the gross value of industrial output for the country as a whole during 1965-73 and the industrial growth rates of various provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities during the same period, and between the total number of small fertilizer and cement plants in 1973 and the numbers of these plants in individual provinces and their equivalents in the same year.

A comparison of some of the statistics published in the 1970's with those in the 1950's again does not seem to reveal any major inconsistency. For example, the official production figures of grain, crude steel, chemical fertilizers, crude oil, and cotton cloth published for these two periods seem to correlate closely on the basis of what has become known about the development of these sectors in the last 25 years. Field, Lardy, and Emerson connected the provincial indexes of the gross value of industrial output for the 1960's and 1970's with the absolute data for the 1950's to estimate the absolute totals for the country as a whole for the years 1965-73, and the resulting estimates seem to reflect in general China's industrial growth in the last decade.24

18 Robert Michael Field, Nicholas Richard Lardy, and John Philip Emerson, A Reconstruction of the Gross Value of Industrial Output by Province in the People's Republic of China: 1949-1973, Foreign Demographic Analysis Division, Bureau of Economic Analysis, U.S. Department of Commerce, forthcoming.

in Thomas Rawski, op. cit.

20 Thomas B. Weins, "Agricultural Statistics in the People's Republic of China: Another Look," a paper presented at the Conference on Quantitative Measures of China's Economic Output. Washington, D.C., Jan. 17-18. 1975.

21 Chu-yuan Cheng. U.S. Export Potential of Petroleum Equipment to the People's Republic of China, prepared for the Office of East-West Trade Analysis, Bureau of East-West Trade, U.S. Department of Commerce, under contract No. 4-36289, September 1974.

22 Field. Lardy, and Emerson, op. cit.

23 Rawski, op. cit.

24 Field, Lardy, and Emerson, op. cit.

There also appears to be a broad consistency between quantitative and qualitative data. Perkins cited a few examples to support this contention for statistics published prior to the Great Leap Forward.25 In an attempt to ascertain the changing pattern of spatial distribution of Chinese industry, I gathered data to derive estimates for the percentage increase in the gross value of industrial output between 1965 and 1973 for various provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities.26 A rank test for the significance of the difference in these industrial growth rates between coastal and inland provinces suggests that industrial production in the interior grew more rapidly than in the coastal areas. A second test was made to measure the degree of relationship between two sets of ranks the ranks of various provinces and their equivalents according to the gross value of industrial output in 1954 and their ranks according to the rates of industrial growth during 1965-73. The rank correlation coefficient is significant at the 5-percent level. These two tests together suggest that industrially backward provinces, which are mostly in the interior, tended to develop more rapidly than more advanced provinces, most of which are located in the coastal areas. These findings seem to accord with the available information showing that the Chinese policy is to spread industry to the interior, and that in recent years state investment has gone up sharply in some of the industrially backward provinces.27

Proof of internal consistency of published Chinese statistics does not constitute proof of lack of outright fabrication. Could not the Chinese practice statistical falsification in the sense of what Prof. Abram Bergson in his discussion of Soviet statistics has called "free invention under double bookeeping?" 28 As in the Soviet case, the answer seems to be in the negative. There is no evidence to indicate that the Chinese maintain two sets of national statistics, one for planning and another for propaganda. In fact, several considerations point. to the contrary.

To maintain two sets of statistics would require a huge administrative apparatus and a high degree of statistical sophistication. The PRC inherited a weak statistical foundation in 1949, and encountered many difficulties in the establishment of a state statistical system during the 1950's.29 These difficulties were aggravated by the poor quality of the working force in statistics.30 The quality deteriorated further in the Great Leap Forward, and probably again was affected adversely during the Cultural Revolution. Since there are literally millions of basic accounting units in China, the supply of statistical personnel has never been able to meet the demand.31 It is difficult, therefore, to envisage how a vast country like China with a statistical working

25 Dwight Perkins, op. cit., pp. 220-221.

28 Nai-Ruenn Chen. "Industrial Development in China." Trade Analysis Division. Bureau of East-West Trade. U.S. Department of Commerce. Research Note 11. October 1974. 27 For example, state industrial investment in Ningsia Hui Autonomous Region in the 7-year period 1966 to 1973 was 85 percent above total state investments in the region in the 17-year period 1949 to 1965. (People's Daily, Aug. 26, 1973. p. 3.)

Abram Bergson, "Reliability and Usability of Soviet Statistics: A Summary Appraisal." The American Statistician, vol. VIII, No. 3 (June-July 1953), pp. 19-23.

For an excellent discussion of China's statistical system in the 1950's. see Choh-ming Li. op. cit.

As pointed out by the State Statistical Bureau in May 1954, "an overwhelming majority of the national statistical working force never had any special training in statistics. lacking any knowledge in statistical work or economic construction***" (Cited in Li, op. cit., pp. 51-52.)

31 Leo Orleans estimated that "the number of persons with high degree in statistics was very small; probably not more than a few hundred a year obtained degrees between 1961 and 1966." (Orleans, op. cit. p. 50.)

force deficient in both quality and quantity could operate a double bookkeeping system on a national scale without detection.

If the Chinese Government were to compile a separate set of statistics for propaganda, those propagandized would have included the Chinese people on the mainland.32 The statistics contained in Chinese broadcasts to the areas outside the mainland such as Taiwan, Japan, Southeast Asia, and the Soviet Union, and in foreign-language publications such as Peking Review, China Reconstructs, and China's Foreign Trade have usually appeared also in domestic broadcasts and in publications for domestic circulations such as Jen-min jih-pao and Hung-chi. The Chinese Government relies heavily on the news media Jen-min jih-pao in particular, to disseminate information and directives throughout the country. False economic data would tend to mislead cadres at various levels in making economic decisions, and therefore would have disruptive effects on the economy.

The PRS appears to have adopted a policy of withholding unfavorable information and publishing mainly statistics showing success. As noted earlier, there was and still is a concealment of most of national production statistics for the 1960's when the economy suffered difficulties and disruptions. The industrial statistics published so far for the 1970's have covered mostly those industries with high growth rates, and relatively few figures have been released for those industries having mediocre performance. As Professor Li points out:

If it is true that only statistics of achievements are published while those reflecting difficulties and problems are either withheld or not collected at all, then there are not likely to be two sets of national statistics * * * 33

This contention is also borne out by a check of official claims against data gathered outside China. For example, Chinese sources indicate that foreign trade turnover (exports and imports combined) in 1972 was 48.4 percent larger than that in 1965, and that 1973 trade turnover was 466 percent larger than that in 1952 and 159 percent larger than that in 1965. These claims are basically consistent with independent estimates constructed on the basis of the trade statistics of China's trading partners.35 Another example is Chou En-lai's statement that 1970 cloth output was 8.5 billion meters. This figure compared with cloth output figures published for the 1950's seems to be in general agreement with the outside information about the PRC economy such as raw cotton output and imports, cotton cloth exports, per capita consumption of cotton cloth, and the state of the synthetic fiber industry during the corresponding period.36

Based on the above considerations it may be concluded that Chinese statistics are not deliberately falsified by the central authorities. This conclusion, however, does not imply that deliberate falsification is not practiced by lower administrative echelons. On the contrary, falsifica

32 This point was raised in Perkins, op. cit., p. 216.

33 Choh-ming Li, op. cit. p. 149.

34 Li Chiang, op. cit.; Peking Review, Nov. 30. 1973; and Shu Hsuan, "Develop Foreign Trade by Maintaining Independence Keeping the Initiative in Our Own Hands and Relying on Our Own Efforts." People's Daily, Oct. 15. 1974. p. 6.

35 See Nai-Ruenn Chen, "China's Foreign Trade, 1950-74," in this volume; and Alexander Eckstein. "China's Economic Growth and Foreign Trade," U.S.-China Business Review, vol. 1, No. 4 (July-August 1974), pp. 15-20.

36 Rawski, op. cit.