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Comment by evbots | Hacker News Reader

Do you have a source for this?

I think the OP might have been misunderstanding a thing that actually happens. Because officials are graded on whether they hit targets or not but they don't get extra points for exceeding them they have an incentive to under-report growth in good years so that a return to accurate reporting in bad years lets them still report growth. So there will be a combination of over and under-reporting of growth at different times, as was show in the graphs in the article. How China Escaped the Poverty Trap goes into more detail for those interested.

... except top-level officials are constantly shuffled between posts in different cities/provinces they have no family ties to specifically to prevent such corruption.

That only actually prevents it if:

(1) rotations are most often exactly one of the periods on which goals and evaluations occur (that is, understating growth that at least meets the goal never is expected to help you by making it more likely you can plausibly claim to meet a growth goal the next period), and

(2) the rotating top-level officials have some other structursl disincentive to form a class identity and class norms (stack ranking where the top slice promotes into a national administration group and the bottom slice is demoted out of regional leadership, while the middle group remains, for instance, would do this, since everyone would have a strong incentive to make everyone else's results relatively worse; OTOH, this incentivizes an opposite kind of misreporting, so it's not really a solution.)

some other structural disincentive

Oh you mean like "play by the rules, have a nice life for you and your family" versus "capital punishment for you, and movement restriction and asset seizure for your family"?

Sure, if the punishment is perceived to be applied reliably and accurately.

If it's perceived to be applied in a spotty manner, according to shifting whims of the leadership as to issues of concern, and with favoritism that can see the guilty free and the innocent punished, then, no, that just incentivizes currying favor and trying to influence the leadership perception that drive where enforcement is and isn't focussed.

I have heard a theory that goes something like this: China spends massive amounts on propaganda yet everyone believes that China's economy is about to crash and the society is about to fall apart. Are they grossly incompetent? No. China wants the declining western powers to underestimate its rise and strength as cunning way of avoiding conflict until its outcome is certain. Make of it what you will.

Having travelled to China a few times over the past two decades, I have witnessed the economic growth with my own eyes and it is quite real. That of course does not mean that any number coming out of China is real and that there are not big inbalances whoes correction is overdue.

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