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This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1959

One of the most baffling problems in contemporary Chinese economic studies concerns the validity of official statistics. In the continuing discussion of claims and counter-claims, appeals to common sense are unconvincing. Because of the pressing need for substantial evidence on which to base a judgment, the present inquiry is an important contribution to the literature on Communist China. The book provides a quizzical but objective look at the statistical syst

China had no Second Five-Year Plan (1958–62) only five ad hoc annual plans during that period. In basic construction and industrial production a great leap forward did take place in the first three years, only to be followed by collapse and readjustment in the last two years. In agriculture, the period started with an unprecedented bumper crop in the first year, after which there commenced an agricultural crisis that grew in intensity from year to year until 1962 when the output of food grains and green vegetables began to show recovery. This was in sharp contrast to the First Five-Year Plan period which concluded with spectacular achievements in heavy industry, moderate success in light industry and slow but steady improvement in agriculture.

How good are Communist China's statistics? An attempt to answer this basic but vexing question has led me to investigate the working of its state statistical service. Since there was hardly any statistical system to speak of before 1949, did Peking manage to set one up that was actually workable? When did this happen and how did it develop? Where were official statistics produced and finalised? Were they used for planning purposes at different government levels? How were basic data obtained from the primary reporting units in different sectors of the economy? What mechanism was introduced to provide a degree of control over the quality of data? What were the size and quality of the statistical working force? What did occur in 1958 and 1959 when current official statistics had to be scaled down drastically from earlier officially authenticated claims? Are the revised figures satisfactory? Why have so few statistical materials been released since 1959? The search into these and many more questions has resulted in a volume on The Statistical System of Communist China, recently (1962) published by the University of California Press.

In the ten years of Communist rule since late 1949 a thoroughgoing revolution has taken place on the Chinese mainland in economic organisation, savings and investment, and distribution, with profound effects on the daily lives of the people. Peking has claimed that immense progress has been made on all economic fronts, including the real income of industrial and agricultural workers. It has felt confident enough to shorten from fifteen to ten years (beginning 1958) the target period at the end of which its output of electric power and certain major industrial goods would match or exceed that of Britain. In the non-Communist world, commentators vary greatly in their judgments; they range from those who reject all the official statistics and consider no important progress to have been made during the period, to those who not only accept the claims in tato but have advanced all sorts of arguments to defend even those claims that Peking has later had to repudiate.