Bad data to cover up problems or gain benefit is a longstanding problem with official statistics published in the People's Republic of China:<p><i>Even after the Great Leap Forward, and as early as 1982, the Chinese Central Committee found that “the most difficult thing for a leadership unit to do is to collect accurate information at the basic level,” (Tasi, 2008, p. 805) as local officials often inflated their village income figures. In a survey of 316 villages, 81% of officials said their reported village income was higher than their real income, demonstrating that official reports for net income per capita in villages differed from their true values (Tsai, 2008, p. 809). Motivations for the inflation of income per capita lay in taxation rates and revenue. When economic figures were inflated in a village, officials were able to increase tax rates and thus increase the amount of levies they collected, taking more from citizens who had less to begin with, bearing a semblance to the Maoist era.</i><p><a href="https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/mje/2021/11/29/data-falsification-a-short-track-to-large-scale-economic-disasters/" rel="nofollow">https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/mje/2021/11/29/data-falsificatio...</a><p>Another major area where official statistics lied concerned the impact of policies implemented under Mao Zedong. It wasn't until the 1980s that scholars using statistical methods and modern population figures were able to determine that tens of millions of excess deaths had occurred during the Great Leap Forward 25 years earlier, which could be attributed to specific CCP policies during that time (<a href="https://ccpr.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Mortality-Consequences-of-the-1959-1961-Great-Leap-Forward-Famine-in-China_-Debilitation_-Selection_-and-Mortality-Crossovers.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://ccpr.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Mortality-C...</a>)