As China continues to tighten information flows in and out of the country, how reliable are statistics from official Chinese sources? Recent media pieces have highlighted the deepening lack of government transparency and accuracy when it comes to important data, and its implications for research related to China. The latest example is from Rebecca Feng and Jason Douglas at The Wall Street Journal, who wrote this week about how “Beijing has stopped publishing hundreds of statistics, making it harder to know what’s going on in the country”:

Land sales measures, foreign investment data and unemployment indicators have gone dark in recent years. Data on cremations and a business confidence index have been cut off. Even official soy sauce production reports are gone.

In all, Chinese officials have stopped publishing hundreds of data points once used by researchers and investors, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.

In most cases, Chinese authorities haven’t given any reason for ending or withholding data. But the missing numbers have come as the world’s second biggest economy has stumbled under the weight of excessive debt, a crumbling real-estate market and other troubles—spurring heavy-handed efforts by authorities to control the narrative.

[…] Some data are still publicly available but harder to get. Beijing passed a law in 2021 that caused data providers to make certain information—such as corporate registry data and satellite images—accessible only in mainland China.

[….] Some information that has disappeared defies explanation. Data providing estimates of the size of elementary school toilets stopped being released in 2022, then resumed publication in February. Official soy sauce production data stopped appearing in May 2021, and hasn’t returned. [Source]

Another reminder of the unreliability of China’s official statistics came in March after the U.S. announced that its embassies around the world would cease publishing data about local air quality. This long-running transparency initiative began in 2008 when the U.S. Embassy in Beijing shared real-time information about toxic levels of PM2.5 microparticles in the capital’s air. The Chinese Foreign Ministry later complained that because the U.S. data conflicted with China’s (which measured only larger PM10 particles), they were causing “confusion” and undesirable “social consequences.” Under pressure, the Chinese government eventually established its own PM2.5 monitoring system, admitted that air pollution was a significant problem, and took greater corrective measures. However, there is still insufficient transparency in this domain. A recent paper in the journal Nature revealed notable discrepancies between China’s annual and monthly official statistics regarding CO2 emissions between 2014 and 2020 when calculating near real-time estimates of those emissions.

Shaky statistics such as those help Chinese state media’s external propaganda. In an article from March titled “Fact Check: What Western media get wrong about China’s economy,” Xinhua argued that “Western media’s relentless fixation on peddling narratives of China’s economic doom demonstrates their entrenched bias and agenda-driven reporting. Contrary to those claims, […] key economic indicators showed significant improvement” in China’s economy. Western reporting aside, China’s official annual GDP growth rates have been widely seen as misleading, generating doubts about the true state of the Chinese economy. In March, Nicholas R. Lardy and Tianlei Huang at the Peterson Institute for International Economics noted that while China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has improved the quality of certain macroeconomic data—such as fixed asset investment, international trade in goods, household income and expenditure, and value-added in financial services—it continues to selectively withhold other important information:

The paradox of China’s economic data thus lies in its dual character: The disappearance of certain data points, sometimes those related to economic weakness, raise concerns about the authority’s selective transparency. Yet at the same time, Beijing has better aligned its data with international standards and improved their quality. While its push for quality improvements shows its commitment to more reliable statistics, its selective withholding of information inevitably undermines confidence in the overall picture. If Beijing really wants to build trust in its economic data, it needs to ensure greater transparency, even though some statistics may expose vulnerabilities in its economy. [Source]

Last November, Vincent Brussee published an article in The China Quarterly about the “missingness” of Chinese policy documents. Among the hundreds of thousands of policy documents he scraped from official sources between 2021 and 2023, nearly 20 percent were unavailable two years after their publication. Within the latter group, 10 percent were unavailable due to issues uploading the websites, 7.7 percent due to broken links, and 1.9 percent had been intentionally deleted. Brussee described the implications of these findings for researchers’ knowledge base of China:

As this paper demonstrates, there is significant variation in policy transparency and document availability over time. Transparency originally improved between 2008 and the mid-2010s. Today, however, transparency is in decline in several fields, especially in fields where there are related geopolitical tensions. There is also significant variation among types of documents, with top-level policies seeing significantly higher disclosure rates than lower-level documents. Variation among topics appears primarily in the extent to which a topic is related to national security or citizens’ daily lives. Finally, disappearance of documents is a real challenge for research. Thus, studies working with policy data must be open about how they mitigate missingness.

[…] This paper invites broader reflection on the fragility of our knowledge base and the use of convenient datasets in China studies. Policy documents are not propaganda, yet the fact that all these data are available to “us” also suggests that their availability serves a political purpose. The developments highlighted throughout this paper suggests that this curation of information sources is only likely to intensify. Understanding the context in which these sources are produced and what can – and, more importantly, cannot – be learned from them is crucial. [Source]

CDT has covered numerous incidents of Chinese sources publishing, and often later censoring, official data in ways that many netizens deem questionable. The following is a non-exhaustive list of examples from the past two years.

• January 2025: After online sleuths found numerous examples of data fraud in clinical trials for generic drugs in China, China’s National Medical Products Administration claimed the data irregularities were simply “editing errors” and then blocked access to the data.
• December 2024: Viral video and transcripts of two unusually critical speeches about the accuracy of official statistics on the Chinese economy—by economists Gao Shanwen and Fu Peng, respectively—were deleted from multiple Chinese social media platforms, and the economists’ WeChat accounts were shut down.
• August 2024: After the State Council Information Office hosted a series of press conferences intended to showcase government accomplishments using optimistic statistics, some netizens sardonically mentioned “launching Sputniks” or “10,000 catties per mu,” phrases that reference the insanely optimistic targets and grossly exaggerated rice and grain yields reported by localities during the Great Leap Forward.
• July 2024: Public access to a tanker-truck tracking app was suspended after investigative reports revealed that cooking oil was being transported in fuel-oil tanker trucks that were not washed between transports.
• April 2024: The NBS announcement of a high nationwide average per-capita disposable income led many netizens to mock this “daily dose of humor” and wonder, “When can I expect to receive my portion of this increase?”
• February 2024: A Guangzhou research center’s public opinion poll on the state of the private economy, the outlook for employment, and current incomes showed the largest drop in public satisfaction in 30 years. A post about the poll was deleted from WeChat.
• August 2023: After youth unemployment hit a record 21.3 percent, the government stopped publishing data on the subject and online censors targeted discussion of unemployment.
• July 2023: A report on provincial cremation statistics was removed from Zhejiang’s government website and discussion of the statistics were censored on Q&A site Zhihu, after the central government stopped publishing cremation data.
• June 2023: A series of infographics from Sohu News highlighting poverty, youth unemployment, and other social issues, using statistics mostly drawn from government sources, were scrubbed from Weibo.
• May 2023: Media outlets reported that China’s top financial data provider, Wind Information, began restricting foreign access to its data in 2022, and company information databases Qichacha and Tianyancha also shut down access for foreign users.
• January 2023: After the NBS announced China’s sharp population decline, the state-affiliated Beijing Business Today reported on a survey purporting to show that “80% of university students would like to have two children,” drawing online mockery about the misleading results.

For more on this topic, see CDT’s archives related to data and statistics, and our interview with Jeremy Wallace about data manipulation in China. (This CDT post from May 2024 also contains a related timeline about censorship of economic content in China, which includes but is not limited to content about official statistics.)