There is a history in China of this sort of mindset – setting a target, and forcing the “facts” to fit the target number. It is familiar to anyone who takes on the challenge of interpreting Chinese economic data. In 2010, a prominent American investor made this
point about Chinese economic statistics:
- “In the West our economic growth is a result of decisions that you make and I make and that the market reflects via pricing, and at the end of the day we calculate all activity, and that’s our economic growth. In China it starts with, “We are going to grow 9% next year. Now, how do we get there?” It’s the start of the equation and the activity is the residual. And that’s philosophically the problem. In China it’s all about making the number. People are rewarded at almost every level of government of making their numbers…. You don’t want to lose face, and it’s all-important to your advancement in the Communist Party and your local party to make that number.”
“Zero Covid” may well be a valid public health objective (although we in the West now tend to think differently, in terms of something more like “making Covid livable”). But in the Chinese context, once Zero was declared as the target, it mobilized the bureaucracies — medical, governmental, military – to “make the number,” and in the Beijing way, the shortest short-cut to achieve that number is to fudge the data. Beijing wants Zero? We’ll give them Zero.
(But it doesn’t mean the cost will be Zero.)
