“The picture that emerges, in his analysis, is a pattern of systematic inflation across multiple data sources”
In explaining the gap, Yi describes what he calls a contamination cycle: Census figures were adjusted upward using education and household registration data that had themselves been exaggerated. Schools padded enrollment by 20% to 50% once funding shifted from local governments to the central government. Hospital birth records swelled after rural insurance began covering deliveries.
The politics of population
Today, with Beijing tying birthrates to local officials’ performance reviews and rolling out pro-natal subsidies, local governments have every incentive to overstate the numbers, Yi said, both to win political credit and to secure subsidy funds.
Scholar’s Monograph—China’s Population Data Manipulation.
2005 (!) Ed Hughes:
This points up one of the frustrating aspects of trying to follow school issues in Madison: the recurring feeling that a quoted speaker – and it can be someone from the administration, or MTI, or the occasional school board member – believes that the audience for an assertion is composed entirely of idiots.
