China's Economic Data Riddled with Fabrications and Manipulations for Decades
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Chinese economic data has been consistently manipulated and fabricated for decades, with provinces cooking the books and statistics agency "adjusting" numbers.
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Official GDP growth targets are met with unrealistic consistency, despite independent estimates of actual growth being much lower.
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Provinces were ordered to meet impossible growth targets, leading to widespread fabrication that statisticians couldn't verify.
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The statistics agency was given power to change past GDP figures, and suddenly declared the economy 17% larger overnight in 2005.
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With such a long history of bad data, it's impossible to accurately determine China's true GDP now - the official $18 trillion figure may as well be written in crayon.