New York: Oxford University Press, 2023. x, 273 pp. (Tables, graphs, maps.) US$25.00, paper. ISBN 9780197627662.
Observers of Chinese politics have long noted the party-state’s fixation on GDP, while also acknowledging that government statistics are unreliable. However, this characteristic of Chinese politics is typically treated as a given, naturalized as a structural feature of a country focused on economic growth. In Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts, Jeremy Wallace places the regime’s focus on quantified indicators at the centre of his insightful new analysis of Chinese politics. By carefully examining the role of quantification in governance in China, Wallace reveals both the strengths and limitations of this approach and provides a framework for understanding a wide range of policy areas from the Mao era to the present.
Wallace convincingly argues that the party-state has ruled through “a system of limited, quantified vision,” which has provided evidence of the leadership’s successes to promote its legitimacy based on performance, but has also led to critical problems, including overlooking important policy areas and incentivizing data falsification. Wallace posits that the resurgence of ideology in China seeks to correct and compensate for some of the shortcomings of decades of GDPism.
Wallace’s book provides a new lens for understanding both the changes and continuities in Chinese politics from 1949 to the present. China’s party-state has grappled with managing a complex bureaucracy and maintaining performance legitimacy during both the Mao and post-Mao eras. Wallace demonstrates how, through quantifiable indicators, the party-state managed to communicate clear benchmarks and incentives for local officials. In the Maoist period, quantified targets were employed most often in the form of campaigns, which often ended with tragic consequences, as in the famine caused by the Great Leap Forward. After Mao’s death, as Deng Xiaoping shifted the country’s priorities toward economic growth through the gradual introduction of market forces, quantifiable targets again emerged as a fundamental characteristic of how the party-state functioned.
During the economic reform era, Wallace demonstrates the nearly single-minded focus on GDP statistics at the regional and national level. He aptly explains how the focus on GDP both promoted spectacular economic growth and led to serious negative externalities. Existing research shows the importance of GDPism in the cadre evaluation system, but Wallace focuses on how the choice of statistics to incentivize local officials mattered. On the one hand, placing primacy on GDP incentivized economic growth. However, local officials typically neglected many other possible measures of population well being, such as life expectancy, air quality, water quality, or life satisfaction. As a result, myriad social and environmental challenges became apparent by the early 2000s. To ameliorate these concerns, top leadership made substantial (but insufficient) adjustments in policy, funding, and cadre evaluation.
Wallace’s new analysis of Chinese politics enables readers to appreciate some of the consistency across policy areas and over time. For example, the party-state has used quantified governance to control women’s bodies. During the Mao era, the draconian implementation of the one-child policy, which limited the number of children per woman, involved quantified targets at the local level and thus resulted in brutal enforcement by local officials. In the 2020s, the party-state has encouraged women to give birth to three children, to mitigate the effects of an aging population. Despite the shift in population policy, the focus on quantified metrics has persisted.
Wallace examines contrasting cases of quantification that reveal how this approach to governing worked, and its limitations. In the area of environmental pollution, “green GDP”—a complex measure that aims to take environmental degradation into account when measuring economic growth—did not gain traction in China, whereas PM 2.5 emerged as a powerful indicator that galvanized popular sentiment, which pressured the party-state to take decisive action on air pollution. Wallace adeptly uses these cases to demonstrate the inherent limitations of some metrics. Although the party-state has taken important steps to reduce air pollution, PM 2.5 only represents one facet of the environmental challenges facing China and the world.
In addition to its novel and insightful interpretation of Chinese politics, Wallace’s book includes several empirical contributions. Wallace rigorously demonstrates the extent and nature of data falsification. First, he proves that provincial-level GDP statistics are more likely to be falsified during years of provincial leadership turnover. Then, Wallace shows how local officials with informal ties to higher-level leaders are less likely to falsify statistics. By creatively examining the likelihood of falsification, Wallace sheds light on the links between quantified governance targets, effective policy implementation, and information gathering in an autocracy. Wallace’s examination of falsification also suggests that both merit and informal ties matter in local officials’ career trajectories, speaking to a large literature on this topic in Chinese politics.
In the final sections of the book, Wallace examines China’s “neopolitical turn” under Xi Jinping’s leadership. Wallace demonstrates the resurgence of ideology under Xi, but the question remains: To what extent will the “limited, quantified vision” persist as a central feature of governance in China?
While Wallace analyzes a wide range of policies, further research could examine more closely the relationship between quantification and population control. For example, work units were expected to identify 5 percent of their populations as anti-rightists in the Mao era and police in Xinjiang have been tasked with quantified targets to root out alleged Uyghur separatists. Future research could examine the relationship between quantifiable indicators and coercion as complementary tools for autocrats to manage large and complex populations.
Future research could go even further to examine the effects—intentional and unintentional, beneficial and deleterious—of a “limited, quantified vision.” For example, at various stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, local leaders in China, the US, and elsewhere manipulated data to reduce official counts of COVID deaths. In the future, how can leaders incentivize bureaucrats to provide accurate data? This is a crucial question, both for regime stability in China, but also for good governance more broadly.
Wallace’s engaging book provides both theoretical and empirical contributions to the study of Chinese politics, autocracy, and governance. The book offers a thorough, but highly readable, analysis that will benefit students and scholars alike.
Kerry Ratigan
Amherst College, Amherst