Contrary to what one might reasonably expect after forty years of ‘Reform and Opening Up’, the situation is not so very different today. A few years ago Li Keqiang, China’s current premier, referred to the country’s figures for domestic output as ‘man-made and therefore unreliable’. Experts, of course, know this, and find ways around it. There is, for instance, a ‘Li Keqiang index’, one the premier used himself to monitor economic performance by scrutinising total electricity consumption. But the fact remains that we know very little. As the China observer James Palmer put it recently, ‘Nobody
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