Chinese Statistics Bureau Investigated Over ‘Service Fees’

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/29/business/international/china-statistics-corruption.html

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HONG KONG — China’s National Bureau of Statistics’ quarterly reports on the country’s gross domestic product are viewed with such skepticism that even the country’s premier, Li Keqiang, developed an alternate way of gauging economic growth when he was a provincial official. In January, the director of the bureau, Wang Baoan, was felled in a corruption investigation.

Now, a report released Wednesday on the website of the Communist Party’s anticorruption watchdog found that employees at the bureau were using their positions to make extra money on the side, collecting “service fees” for providing statistics and conducting research.

The Communist Party cadres in the bureau were caught up in moneymaking activities that amounted to 3.23 million renminbi, or about $500,000, the report said. It did not give a period over which these fees were collected, nor did it specify what statistics were being sold, only stating that the people involved are “being investigated.”

That figure may understate the extent of the moneymaking, as China’s statistics agency has long taken an entrepreneurial approach to disseminating its information. As early as 2001, foreign financial news agencies in Beijing had to pay a company affiliated with the statistics bureau a fee to receive faxed copies of monthly figures, like industrial production and retail sales.

The lengthy report — it exceeded 14,000 Chinese characters — was steeped in the almost indecipherable language used by Communist Party officials and filled with paeans to the important guidance of Xi Jinping, the country’s president and head of the Communist Party. It also included an exhortation to study a work of Chairman Mao Zedong called “The Working Methods of Party Committees.” Mao, who died in 1976, was the first leader of the People’s Republic of China.

The investigation of the statistics bureau took place from late October to December last year, and Mr. Wang was removed from his post shortly thereafter. Party cadres in the bureau had to undergo criticism sessions — a tried and true method of enforcing discipline in the party — with the goal of making them “red-faced and sweating,” the report said.

The report also found that 19 people in the bureau were improperly promoted, and that some people misused government vehicles and office space.