How to Spot an Autocrat’s Economic Lies Winston Smith, the protagonist of George Orwell’s 1984, spends his days as an employee at the Ministry of Truth adjusting documents to conform to the fluctuating political needs of Big Brother’s regime. “Who controls the past controls the future, who controls the present controls the past,” Orwell wrote, drawing a connection between a government’s ability to influence what the public perceives as the truth and that government’s political survival. Although he leaned to the political left, Orwell was deeply wary of the tyranny coalescing in the Soviet Union, which sought to bend reality to its needs. Joseph Stalin had a penchant for manipulating photographs, airbrushing out figures whom he had purged. He also wanted to rule untrammeled over the field of official statistics. Stalin had the bureaucrats in charge of the 1937 census arrested and executed after their findings displeased him; the initial results suggested that the Soviet population had not grown as much as expected in the preceding years, mostly as a result of the 1932–33 famine caused by Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture.To get more https://www.shine.cn/biz/economy/ latest news about china economy, you can visit shine news official website. Governments of all stripes remain preoccupied by such statistics, and many leaders feel compelled to cook the books. In a December 2022 address, Chinese President Xi Jinping claimed that his country’s GDP was expected to exceed 120 trillion yuan ($17 trillion, around $6 trillion less than that of the United States) for the year. If true, this figure implied an annual growth rate for the economy of approximately 4.4 percent, much higher than the 3.3 percent growth rate that independent forecasters had expected. It also suggested that the Chinese economy is well on its way to matching its American counterpart, at least in absolute terms, and could overtake the U.S. economy in as little as a decade. Such a feat would be the culmination of what is already the greatest economic success story of recent times and would further increase China’s geopolitical heft. But there is good reason to doubt the magnitude of Beijing’s economic achievements. The Chinese government and those of other autocracies are especially prone to inflating statistics regarding their performance. Of course, leaders in democracies try to burnish their records in all sorts of cynical and even deceitful ways, but their statements tend to face greater scrutiny and resistance. Autocrats can lie much more easily. My research, which parses satellite images of night-time lights in order to provide a more accurate measure of economic activity, finds that autocracies habitually overstate their economic success. China’s GDP growth, in truth, is not as high as its leaders insist, and the country is not as close to catching up with the United States as is commonly presumed. China’s statistics have long inspired doubt. Academics have debated for years whether the numbers produced by the Chinese government on topics as diverse as air pollution and workplace safety should be trusted. Beijing’s decision to abruptly end its strict zero-COVID policies at the end of 2022 prompted questions about the credibility of its official COVID-19 mortality figures, which remained impossibly low.