China’s graft watchdog said it identified cases of fake economic data in two northern provinces, the second announcement this year about unreliable figures.
Some areas and companies in Jilin and certain places in Inner Mongolia falsified reports, the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection said in statements late on Sunday, without specifying what figures were manipulated, how widespread the practice was, or the timeframe.
The commission also said it found violations in the use of funding for poverty relief.
The accuracy of China’s statistics has been questioned in the past as readings, such as GDP growth or jobless rates, showed uncanny stability, while provincial officials previously had incentives to inflate growth numbers to enhance their careers. Liaoning Province, which neighbors Jilin in the northeast, this year admitted faking fiscal data from 2011 to 2014.
China’s National Bureau of Statistics in April said that it established a new supervisory arm to ensure data authenticity and improve data quality.
Jilin, which borders North Korea, rose at the second-slowest pace of all provincial regions in the first quarter. Its total output is about half that of Beijing.
Inner Mongolia, with abundant coal and rare earth resources, also has less output than the Chinese capital. It reported an expansion faster than the national average in the January-to-March period.
Parts of northern China have struggled as economic growth decelerates, with the heavy-industrial base Liaoning reporting a mere 2.4 percent expansion after a recession last year.
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
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New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last