By Li Hongmei People's Daily Online

It was recounted unofficially in history that Khwarizmi, an ancient Mid-Asian kingdom, had a curious tradition that informants who delivered good news to the King would be promoted and rewarded, while those who came along with bad information would be fed to the King's tigers. Thereby, a tacit agreement was reached and widely adopted by the generals fighting at the front, by which they would ask soldiers who deserved rewards to bring back the news of victory, but send back those who defied disciplines to report about a defeat.

It is all right if this just occurs in fictions. But even in real life, people, especially people in power, tend more readily to accept good news, as it is not merely well-tuned to please their ears, but more regarded as a symbol for their administrative success. Bad information, nevertheless, could play down their achievements. This mentality invariably gives rise to a good number of statistics-fixing local officials, and has all these years prompted them to polish their political image by fabricating good stories even at the expense of local people's livelihood. In so doing, they suppose their administrative achievements would be visualized and highlighted.

Generally speaking, there are mainly three ways to obtain popular information—sort it out from facts, modify it based on facts and just fabricate it. Needless to say, the last one proves most time-saving, easiest to come by, and most commonly used by local officials. It has been frequently revealed that some local officials specialize in fabricating data to gain honor, material rewards or promotions from the authorities higher up. Some serious fabrication cases have also been found out in recent years involving the misconducts that, say, some local governments force statistical agencies to fake data or otherwise take revenge on staff who refused to commit such acts.

A law inspection report issued by National People's Congress (NPC), China's top legislature, cited a town in southwestern Chongqing municipality as an example, saying officials of the township in question, in order to achieve its annual economic development goal, simply asked statistical staff to add a '0' to the production value of a local enterprise, making it '30 million yuan' from a previous '3 million yuan.' This also explains why the margin remains so big between the GDP data submitted by local governments and that accumulated by National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). In 2005, the gap was up to nearly 2.66 trillion yuan.

Further more, buried in the jungle of officially faked statistics, there appears nowadays a more insidious way in dealing with the data concerned to make them well-tailored for specific needs, and that is selective manipulation. It is, perhaps, more like a skill than strategy for some local officials to learn and practice what information to select for proper use and what to discard or modify for use. Some 'useful information,' so defined if it is positive, could even be enlarged and made known to the public as swiftly as possible. Driven by power or a strong appetite for power, some officials deal with statistics and data the same way as they do with the molded mud in their hands, which can be easily shaped in whatever way as one pleases.

'An official's success is simply digitalized,' as an ironic saying goes. The social conditions are such that the only yardstick to assess a local official's performance seems to be as simple as just to see how many digits he can produce and submit; and these digits also play a decisive role in his future promotion. No wonder, behind the bubble swollen with figures is always a swirl of power abuses, and a pool of data-rigging and corrupt officials. The false information conveyed by the falsification of statistics and surveys not only infringes upon the public interest but also poses a severe challenge to statistics' quality and accountability in a still fledgling economy. In a long run, what is poisoned by the fake data will not be confined merely to economic sphere, but it may harm national security.

On account of this, China intends to revise the law on statistics to impose severe penalties on officials who 'intervene in government statistical work and manipulate or fabricate data.' And a draft law revision was already submitted to the NPC Monday for much inspection and deliberation. The revision is mainly aimed at banning any willful change of figures by officials for personal gains; once found out, it stated, the statistics-fixing officials will be convicted.

Hopefully, the legislative steps, taken by the government in an effort to enhance the credibility and quality of statistics, prevent and punish fabrication, and promote public sharing of statistical information, will be an effective atonement for statistical accountability, if not a panacea for the inveterate public distrust in official data. After all, it is a good start.