Nobody knows anything about China

As a foreigner in China, you learn to hear the word from locals “you don't know China!” It is usually a harsh reaction to some modern unpleasant issues or to one of the many historical myths that children in the continental part have learned as unmovable facts around the world. But it's also true. We don't know China. However, neither the Chinese nor the government.

We don't know China, because with generally unaccepted means, almost every piece of information released from or around the country is unreliable, partial, or distorted. The visible part of the country, mixed with the regime of a growing censorship and a widespread premonition about information exchange, has damaged our ability to know China. Official data is repeatedly repeated for propaganda purposes and individual career ambitions. This applies to the Chinese as much as it does to foreigners; access can sometimes be easier for Chinese citizens, but the costs of tracking information can be even higher.

For example, we don't know real GDP growth figures. GDP growth has long been one of the main criteria used to try officials' careers as a result, respective data are distorted at each level, as local rapporteur is the same one that benefits from a high increase. If you add GDP figures issued by the provinces, the amount is 10 percent higher than the figure that is finally released by the national government, which in itself is determined to achieve politicised targets. Professional governments have increasingly acknowledged this in recent years, but fraud has continued for decades. We don't know the scale of bad loans, so routine hidden from banks. We don't know the composition of most Chinese financial assets. At times, we do not discern the good news of recovery because the hiding of the bad news has prefigured it. We don't know China's real cofficient Gini, measuring economic inequality.

But economic data can be, ironically, more reliable than most others because so much attention has been paid to its unfaithfulness. China's National Statistics Office has repeatedly drawn attention to cases of poor data reporting and now seeks to gather provincial data itself directly. There have been cleaning and trying to right past mistakes, even though the ever more ideological and paranoid twists of the party state could impede these efforts.

But what we don't know goes beyond the economy. Look at every sector in China and you will find distorted or public-reported information; go to the relevant authorities and they will generally accept in private the most shocking practices.

We do not know the true size of the Chinese population because of the reluctance to register the second unannounced children because the family planning office cannot report that it has not conducted birth control. We do not know where these people are; rural circles are encouraged to exceed the population to get more benefits from the highest levels of government, while urban suburbs report lower figures to achieve population control targets. Beijing's official population is 21.7 million; it can truly be up to 30 or 35 million. Tens of maybe hundreds of millions of immigrants are officially in the village, but they really are in the cities. (Maybe. We do not know the extent of the expulsions of the last winter of the poor from the metropolis.) We don't know if these people are getting fresh air or drinking clean water because environmental data is full of holes.

We don't know anything about Chinese high-level policy. In the best case, we can do as I've made assumptions on information. We do not know how the internal policy of Jongnanhai, the equivalent of the Chinese Kremlin, works. Chinese politicians don't write all the memoirs; Chinese journalists cannot write books like “Zjar and Terram”, “What it Take” or “Game Change”. We don't know if Xi Jinping really appreciates the wealth and power of China or just himself.

We don't know if officials targeted in “anti-corruption campaigns” were really corrupt, lustful or disloyal or if they were only Xi's political opponents. We don't know the extent of factionism within the Chinese Communist Party, even though we know how often its existence is condemned by Xi and his faction. We do not know whether officials who praise Xi give commendation actually believe anything they say or are acting simply out of fear and greed.

We don't know what people really think. We do not know whether those interviewed really support the government or give careful answers when questions asked by a stranger to a politically depressing country. We don't know why Chinese pollsters say they're more trusted by others in any other country in the world, while in practice the paranoia for the purposes of others is so frenzied that older people are not helped in the streets, because of fear of some fraud and children like Wang Yue's case left to die after being hit by cars.

We don't know the real defence budget. We do not know the daily conditions of the Chinese Army because restrictions imposed on military coverage and soldiers' ability to speak are even more limited than on civilians.

We don't know how good Chinese schools are, because the statistics cited much of the Programme for International Students Rating (PISA) that put China first in the world were taken from studying a small group of elite schools in Shanghai. Once this champion expanded to Beijing alone another metropolis and the two rich provinces, the results dropped sharply. (PISA's desire to accept this limited sample only is typical of the covetability and compatibility of many foreign NGOs, especially in education, when dealing with China; I have seen that many foreign educators fall victim to obvious Potemkinism, including the belief that High School No. 4 in Beijing We do not know the extent of the collapse of rural education. We do not know real literacy figures, especially because rural and urban literacy is measured by different standards a common fraud for many figures.

We do not know the real crime figures, especially in cities, which can represent no less than 2.5 percent of the current total. We don't know the number of deaths for the ethnic torture uprising in Xinjiang, where local officials, in the words of a government terrorism expert, “shifras dropped just as much as they did during the Grand Open campaign before”, nor do we know how many people are currently held in the “our re-education campaign”. (We don't presently know how many people died in the Big Space Forward campaign, gathered in the gaps in villages or abandoned in empty lands: 16.5 million published once in official records or 45 million valued by some historians).

And we don't know what we don't know. These are known unknowns, but unknowns are equally disturbing. We can lose the biggest future stories, the ones that will shake or transform China and the world, now. Foreign journalists are limited to live in several big cities, mainly in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen; they are pursued and harassed when traveling elsewhere in the country and find it especially difficult to reach the village. (According to official population figures, Beijing and Shanghai, often portrayed as the rate for new China, have less than 4 percent of the country's inhabitants. The situation for Chinese journalists is much worse; a limited capacity to conduct investigative journalism in the 2000s is almost extinct by the authorities determined there will be no supervision beyond the party. Fear silences voices; those who once gave names now speak anonymously, while many do not speak at all.

Our sources of information, always a thin leak, have dried up almost entirely under an increasingly strict censorship regime in recent years. The Weibo social media platform was once a limited window to complaints and provincial scandals; now it is massive censorship. Private messages in the group in WeChat, a dominant message service, has replaced it; last year, they were massively censored as well.

All of this does the work of those who successfully extract important economic or political data, such as master researcher Adrian Zenz, even more impressive. And since the government shuts down any source of information outside its control, we can only ask how much it knows. Local officials have always asked for large amounts of data it is not uncommon to receive requests such as: “Redirect all those who participate in religious services in your district and where specifically”. But the system has always distorted the information it sends into the country and may be doing so even more, since Xi is creating a complete dictatorship. Li Badiang, the increasingly insignificant Chinese prime minister (we think), complained to American diplomats in 2007 about his inability to get acquainted with basic economic information about the province he was then running and his need to send friends and colleagues on secret data collection trips.

The government's solution to this is a growing confidence in the large data, a belief that by bypassing lower-level officials can collect information directly from the source. Large amounts of money are poured into large data, including attempts at pro-active police and wide monitoring of dissidents. The government seeks from Chinese firms and foreign firms with a Chinese presence, such as Apple, to store and deliver data on a large scale. But large data itself is prone to systematic distortions, wrong belief, and towards the oldest code rule: waste inside, waste outside.

As economist Josiah Voula praised for another power trying to control a vast territory through printing tools, the [Britian India's] government is very keen to collect statistics ] they collect, add, raise, take up cubic roots and prepare wonderful diagrams. But you should never forget that each one of these figures comes first from the hand of Chowty dar (the village guard), who merely writes what he wants. Will technology allow the Chinese government to do better than that? We don't know. /Freegn Police Read.al/