At the National People’s Congress, the politics of numbers dominates. What those numbers mean for China and the world.

Lili Pike

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China’s annual National People’s Congress began this weekend in Beijing with the typical fanfare. The thousands of delegates who make up the world’s largest legislature streamed in from across the country. Technically, they come to vote on legislation and elect new government officials, but in reality the meetings are more of a performance — the actual decisions have been made well in advance by China’s top leaders.

The key part of that performance is the Government Work Report, which was delivered this year by China’s outgoing premier, Li Keqiang. During Li’s hourlong speech Sunday, the camera panned the Great Hall of the People to show delegates representing China’s 56 ethnic groups, all studiously reading the report.

This year’s opening speech — as is usually the case — was a collection of Communist Party slogans and statistics, a presentation that makes an American State of the Union address look like a Hollywood production. Perhaps the most human moment came when Li spoke about the pandemic: “Our people in their hundreds of millions have prevailed over many difficulties and challenges, made great sacrifices and played their due part,” Li said. “It has not been an easy journey for anyone, but together we have overcome the huge challenge of covid-19.”

But for the most part, the government’s long list of accomplishments and goals were conveyed in numbers — a lot of numbers: 17,000 kilometers of high-speed rail built over the past year, a 40 percent increase in the length of drainage pipelines, the percentage of urban residents — up to 65 percent, “value-added high-tech manufacturing” up by 11 percent. And on it went. Among goals for the year ahead: 12 million new urban jobs and 650 million metric tons of grain production.

No number is more closely anticipated — in China and beyond — than the GDP (gross domestic product), the prime metric for economic growth. The National People’s Congress is the occasion for publicly announcing the growth target for the year ahead — and this weekend that target was announced as “around 5 percent.” For observers, it was a low-end forecast, one that signals caution about China’s economic recovery from the pandemic and the “zero-covid” policy that decimated jobs and factory activity. GDP in 2022 clocked in at just 3 percent growth, among the lowest figures in decades and short of China’s 5.5 percent target by a wide margin.

Whether it’s the GDP or more mundane statistics, the Chinese Communist Party has something of an obsession with numbers and metrics-based forecasts. It also has an uneven record of getting those forecasts right — or even reporting them accurately. Watching which numbers are elevated and which are swept under the rug — such as the true number of covid deaths, to take a recent number that the party has tried to bury — provides hints about the party’s priorities and challenges.

Few scholars have paid as much attention to the party’s fixation on targets and statistics than Jeremy Wallace, a professor of government at Cornell University. Last fall, Wallace published “Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts,” a book that examines the politics of numbers in China. The book’s title is a reference to former party chairman Mao Zedong’s edict — “seeking truth from facts” — a phrase that Mao’s successor Deng Xiaoping used to criticize the leader’s excesses years later. The phrase is still used today; it was even mentioned in Li’s speech this weekend. Grid spoke to Wallace about what the latest numbers and targets tell us, and whether the party, in the era of the current leader, Xi Jinping, has once again strayed from “seeking truth from facts.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Grid: First of all, what does the announced GDP target — 5 percent — signal to you about where China is heading this year?

Jeremy Wallace: I think a 6 percent growth target would have suggested putting the pedal to the metal and releasing the real estate monster that they’ve been trying to hold back. So, I’m heartened that the growth target has been set at a reasonable 5 percent rather than a higher level. Given the pent-up demand from the lockdown year of 2022, reaching this number will not require massive contortions or doubling down on ill-considered investments.

G: Why does the Chinese government set a GDP target? Why does that matter for the government?

JW: The GDP target has been at the center of China’s political economy for most of the past three decades. It structures the way that local government actors and businesses operate. It’s the annual piece of a broader system of grand plans and five-year plans and other things along those lines — quantitative targets that are at the core of the political system. The origins of that system come out of the Cultural Revolution and all of the tumult of Mao Zedong. Having a numbers-based system both seemed relatively fair and relatively pragmatic in a lot of ways to elites in China. And having that concrete set of numbers that officials could be responsible for — targets to hit — has become and remains the core of Chinese politics.

G: How has the huge focus on GDP benefited China, and in what ways has it fallen short?

JW: So the way that I summarized this in “Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts” is, “A few numbers came to define Chinese politics until they did not count what mattered and what they counted didn’t measure up.”

I think the important thing to remember is that, fundamentally, this was very successful. China’s growth story, the reason we’re talking about China’s National People’s Congress, is that China has become an incredibly successful economic development story. And GDP targeting is part of that story, and I think a major part of it.

Over time, though, and especially I would say in the mid 2000s and going forward, the kind of faults of that system, the kind of weaknesses — what it overlooked and what it wasn’t counting — became increasingly apparent. So problems like corruption, like pollution, debt that became overwhelming, were not counted, and they needed to come into focus. Also if what is happening in this system of GDP targets is essentially what political scientists refer to as “output legitimacy” — that a government is seen as justified in its rule because of its performance, its outputs — that performance is slowing, and so that’s not the business you necessarily want to be in.

G: China’s GDP target remains important, but Chinese leaders have tried to introduce other targets and priorities over the years. Can you talk about that shift?

JW: The failures of this system of what I call “limited quantified vision,” I think were really apparent by the mid 2000s, so before Xi Jinping comes into power — the Hu Jintao, Wen Jiabao period. And in fact, Wen Jiabao famously says the four “Uns” — that the Chinese government was “unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated and ultimately unsustainable.” So the interesting thing is that under that regime, under those leaders, the government expanded the set of indicators that local officials would be judged by — expanded radically so rather than just a few indicators like GDP or overall economic performance, environmental indicators were added and so forth [social development and innovation metrics were also added]. But the balance of the numbers still was tilted toward the economy.

G: So if I’m a local government official in China in recent years — let’s say pre-covid, because the covid period is so different — am I still being primarily judged on my economic performance?

JW: There are a lot of other issues that local government officials are judged on these days. All of those expanded numbers that came under Hu Jintao and Wen Jiaobao are still there, but I think there’s increasingly an expanded range of political performance [indicators] — about party-building or ideological performance that are present on cadre evaluation forms. By all indications, the annual cadre evaluation system continues to exist with lots of statistical measurements, but it is less important in the Xi-dominated top-down system than it was previously.

G: So it’s not only a local official’s numeric performance that matters but also their alignment with Xi’s priorities. I’m interested in the moments we’ve seen where local governments have seemed to go to extreme lengths to try to get their name out there and get promoted, like going too far in implementing covid lockdowns. Do those moments reflect a desire to overachieve on the number that they think is most important to Xi Jinping at the moment?

JW: I think it remains the case that Xi Jinping has a system of quantified governance — that he thinks about numbers and puts out targets. Local officials will sometimes skate where they think he’s going or push too hard thinking that this is the thing that will please the Dear Leader. And sometimes I’m sure that that has been successful for individual politicians. On the other hand, the stories you’re noting are often the opposite, right? When local officials go too far, it harms citizens, and there’s a negative reaction. And those [cases] are also incredibly important and suggest that there are real reasons and advantages to having elections and having kind of open systems of information transmission — that the closed information environment under Xi Jinping has real costs.

G: Speaking of the closed information environment, I think a lot of people just assume most Chinese data is unreliable if not entirely falsified. How do you think about that issue? What are the cases where the government does change the data to put out a more positive narrative? And how much of this is top-down versus bottom-up? (Grid recently reported on a mystery surrounding China’s carbon emissions reporting in 2022 — experts say that emissions may have been overreported because local officials and coal miners wanted to show they were meeting energy security-based mining targets.)

JW: So let’s focus on the covid wave and the official death statistics, because I think they fit this stereotype of “You can’t trust the dictator’s data.” China’s rapid move away from zero-covid led to the virus exploding across the country in a way that it really has not anywhere else on the planet in the entire history of the pandemic. So there were more infections over a shorter period of time, and yet the official death count remains around 90,000 people. Infection numbers are well over a billion, and yet, the death numbers don’t really comport with what we know about the virus. And so it’s about 1/10 — the official statistics of around 90,000 versus the estimates that public health researchers put out have suggested around a million deaths during this period.

So that kind of gross, completely disconnected from reality, distortion of statistics does happen and is happening in this case but is not the normal story. The normal story — what happens is when you get caught for data manipulation is that people lose trust. And I think perhaps with the covid story, the government decided that this was singular, this was a particular moment. If the lesson that is learned is you can’t trust the Chinese government when a pandemic wave is ripping through the population and killing a million people, they’re willing to take that loss. But that’s different than a basic economic reality, where if they report grossly false statistics about economic development, year after year, then businesses and others will take their money and go elsewhere. So I think that the way that statistical manipulation usually works in China is not the gross distortion, kind of hiding huge faults, but instead, relatively subtle: 8 percent growth becomes 9.5 percent growth. Those types of things that help you vis-à-vis your competitors as a local government official but not truly distorting from reality.

G: How do you think about the questions around the GDP number from last year? Is that an example of kind of a marginal fudging?

JW: The number came in above expectations, and it just tips [China] just a little bit ahead of the U.S. GDP growth figure from last year. I think that’s not coincidental. I think there was some desire by Chinese elites that they wanted to continue their record of having more rapid growth than the United States. So if it was close enough that they could kind of nudge it in that direction, I think some believe, and I think I’m probably with them, that you might have seen some manipulation on that front.

G: Will numbers become less relevant as loyalty to Xi becomes more and more important?

JW: In many ways, Xi Jinping remains trapped in a world of numbers. Governing a state of 1.4 billion people in some ways requires statistics and numbers — there’s no way to avoid it completely. Even in various campaigns, the anti-poverty campaign or common prosperity, slogans will often be translated into various numerical targets. I think that the big question is less, “Will numbers rule?” but more “Which numbers?” Are they going to be about the numbers of times that you have posted online about the wonderful “Xi Jinping Thought,” or is it going to be about the increased renewable energy production that has taken place in your province, or is it just pure growth?

That remains the question going forward. I think that you’ll see a blend of all of those and at various moments, some will seem stronger than others. But I’m hopeful at least that there is some indication that the direction will be toward improving the lives of the Chinese people.