Chindia Alert: You’ll be Living in their World Very Soon
aims to alert you to the threats and opportunities that China and India present. China and India require serious attention; case of ‘hidden dragon and crouching tiger’.
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Xie Haifeng’s story is one of luck and resilience and he has made it his mission to help others through adversity
Professional dancer owes part of his success to the city of Hong Kong and one of its doctors who helped survivors through recovery
Xie Haifeng was 15 when he lost his leg in one of modern China’s most devastating disasters. Photo: Handout
When the rumbling began, Xie Haifeng thought someone was shaking his bed. Perhaps one of the other 800 children in the school dormitory was being naughty. Or maybe it was a small quake. Then came the unmistakable sound of screams.
Xie, then a 15-year-old pupil at Muyi Town Middle School in the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan, started running. He fell as the dorm building collapsed around him. When he tried to stand up, he realised something was missing. His left leg was gone.
What Xie thought was a small quake turned out to be one of the most devastating disasters in modern Chinese history.
The Sichuan earthquake of May 2008 left at least 87,000 people dead and shook the country to its core. It was less than three month before Beijing would host its first Olympic Games, an opportunity to show the world its strength and ambition.
Instead, 7,444 schools had crumbled like tofu in an area known to be seismically active. Their rubble was a stark demonstration of the weak foundation of China’s progress and its tragic consequences. At Xie’s school, the shoddily built walls and ceilings crushed 600 children. Only 300 survived.
It still frightens me to recall the earthquake.Xie Haifeng, dancer
Xie considers himself lucky. “If I had run just one second more slowly, I would have been dead. If I had run one second faster, I would have been completely fine. But anyway, I am lucky to be alive,” he said. A dozen years later, his story is also one of resilience. Defying all the odds, Xie is now a professional dancer for a troupe in Sichuan and has made it his mission to help others through adversity.
The journey from his hospital bed to the stage was long and difficult and even though many years have passed, “it still frightens me to recall the earthquake”. But, he said: “I have forgiven fate and accepted the reality that I have only one leg.”
Xie’s trauma was a particularly difficult blow to his family. His older sister was already handicapped, after injuring her arm in an accident. When his mother, a migrant worker in the northwestern province of Gansu, arrived at the hospital a few days after the earthquake, she had no idea of the extent of Xie’s condition.
“When I woke up in the evening, I saw my mother weeping beside my bed. I told myself I should be strong,” Xie said, adding that his mother initially thought he had suffered only bruises. He was sent for treatment to a hospital in the prosperous southern city of Shenzhen, along with other survivors who had been left with disabilities by the earthquake.
Defying all the odds, Xie Haifeng is now a professional dancer. Photo: Handout
It was there that Xie was inspired to make the most of his life. A team of athletes visited the hospital and he was shocked to see one of them, a volleyball player, walking on a prosthetic leg.
Xie began to wear a prosthesis and after rehabilitation training returned to his hometown in 2009 where he was admitted to Qingchuan High School. At first, he was self-conscious and felt inferior to his peers. He did not dare to wear shorts in summer and said he seldom talked to the other students.
The following year he was introduced to members of the Chengdu Disabled People’s Art Troupe, where he found a new and welcoming home. Xie quit school and joined the troupe, despite his parents’ opposition. They were convinced study was the only way for rural students like their son to get out of poverty.
Xie learned Sichuan opera and was soon performing its art of bian lian, or
– a skill that requires rapid mask changes in a dazzling sleight of hand – on stage until the troupe was disbanded in 2011, leaving him unemployed for six months.
China marks 10-year anniversary of Sichuan earthquake
But the misfortune led to an improbable opportunity when he was hired by the Sichuan Provincial Disabled People’s Art Troupe and trained to dance. At 19, and with no experience, Xie found the training far more difficult than those who had started at the more usual age of five or six.
His body was too stiff, he said, and in the first months he spent 10 hours each day just stretching and building flexibility. It was just the beginning of a long and often arduous process.
“That agony is too much to be described,” Xie said about the pain of dancing on a prosthetic leg. “During the first six months’ training, I broke three artificial legs.”
More than once, he wondered whether he had chosen the right path. But, ultimately, his gruelling effort paid off and Xie has performed in Singapore, Hong Kong and Macau. In 2013, he won a gold medal at a national dancing competition for people with disabilities.
“My dances won me applause and recognition from the audience. I feel relieved and I think my heart belongs to the stage,” he said.
Xie broke three artificial legs during his first six months of dance training. Photo: Handout
Xie said he owed part of his success to Hong Kong which in 2008 donated HK$20 billion (US$2.5 billion) in aid to Sichuan and sent doctors to treat the injured. Among the volunteers was Poon Tak-lun, a Hong Kong orthopaedist who flew to Sichuan every two weeks from 2008 to 2013 to treat patients.
At a gala show in 2013 to express gratitude from the people of Sichuan to Hong Kong, Xie met Poon and the two became good friends, thanks to their common interest in the arts.
“Dr Poon promised to pay for all the costs of installing and repairing my artificial leg in the future. He told me to focus on dancing without worrying about the leg’s costs,” Xie said.
Xie Haifeng (pictured left with friend Poon Tak-lun) gives a speech to students in Hong Kong. Photo: Handout
Grateful for the help he received from Poon and Hong Kong, Xie has sought to return the favour by doing what he does best.
“I have no other skills except dancing and performing. So I thought of sharing my experience to encourage young students in Hong Kong,” he said.
Xie travels to Hong Kong about twice a year to perform and visit schools. In 2019, he visited the city four times, performing dances and Sichuan opera, and giving speeches at more than 10 primary and secondary schools.
“I encourage them to study hard. I said there are many people in this world who have more difficulties than them but still insist on pursuing their dreams, so they should not give up their dreams,” Xie said.
When he is not dancing and giving inspirational speeches, Xie said he lived a life like everyone else – climbing mountains, swimming and proudly walking on the leg he gained after almost losing everything in Sichuan’s deadly earthquake.
Mainland has overestimated its nominal and real growth rates by about 2 full percentage points on average between 2008 to 2016
Calculations suggest that the current nominal size of the economy is about 18 per cent lower than the official level of US$13.4 trillion at the end of 2018
13 Feb 2019
The paper, “A Forensic Examination of China’s National Account”, was submitted to the “Brookings Papers on Economic Activity”, a journal published by the US-based Brookings Institute. Photo: EPA
China has overestimated its nominal and real growth rates by about 2 full percentage points on average between 2008 to 2016, with the miscalculation increasing each year, according to a new study published on Thursday.
The results indicate that the actual size of China’s economy at the end of 2018 was well below the government’s official estimate.
It also raises questions not only about the quality of economic data from the world’s second largest economy, but also the willingness of the government to take the steps necessary to accurately report information.
Using the study’s findings and applying them to government figures starting with the level of nominal gross domestic product (GDP) at the end of 2007 and the growth rate for 2008, calculations by the South China Morning Post show that the current nominal size of the Chinese economy is about 18 per cent lower than the official level of 90 trillion yuan (US$13.4 trillion) at the end of 2018.
The calculation assumes that the government’s official 2017 and 2018 nominal growth rates are overestimated by 2 percentage points, as suggested by the study.
Overestimates of growth in 2007 and previous years would further reduce the current size of the Chinese economy.
SCMP calculations show the adjusted nominal GDP level in China is about US$11.5 trillion using current exchange rates, still more than twice the size of Japan’s economy at US$5.16 trillion, but well below the economy of the United States at US$20 trillion.
The paper, “A Forensic Examination of China’s National Account”,was submitted to the “Brookings Papers on Economic Activity”, a journal published by the US-based think tank Brookings Institute twice a year on macroeconomic issues that are influencing the public policy debate. It will be formally presented in Washington on Thursday.
“Our estimates suggest that the extent by which local governments exaggerate local GDP accelerated after 2008, but the magnitude of the adjustment by the NBS did not change in tandem,” the authors said.
The study focuses primarily on nominal, non-inflation adjusted growth.
The paper comes at a sensitive time for Chinese policymakers, who are battling a slowing economy due to their campaign to reduce debt and risky lending as well as the effect of the trade war with the United States. The inflation-adjusted growth rate of 6.6 per cent last year was the slowest since 1990.
On Tuesday, the government announced that it had lowered its growth target for 2019 to a range of 6 to 6.5 per cent, down from “about 6.5 per cent” last year due to the multiple headwinds the economy is facing. The government also announced new tax cuts and additional government spending to help stabilise growth.
The paper’s four authors – Chen Wei, Chen Xilu and Michael Song from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Chang-Tai Hsieh from the University of Chicago – used a mix of economic indicators that are less likely to have been manipulated by authorities to prove that the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) have not done enough to correct the errors in the data collected from provincial governments over the past decade.
Our estimates suggest that the extent by which local governments exaggerate local GDP accelerated after 2008, but the magnitude of the adjustment by the NBS did not change in tandem.Report authors
It has long been believed that local Chinese officials inflate figures reflecting their economic performance, which is closely tied to their opportunity for promotion. Since 2003, the NBS has produced a national gross domestic product (GDP) figure that is lower than aggregate provincial data after examining other data such as the census and land sales.
Local statistics bureaus generally overstate industrial output as a portion of overall production as well as the size of investment within overall expenditures, the two different approaches to calculating GDP, according to the paper. The methods of data collection are often the cause, for example, calculations of investment spending have been based purely on government reports on specific projects rather than on the financial statements of the investing firms involved.
One method that the authors used to probe the accuracy of the NBS’s adjustments was comparing the growth of official GDP with the growth of revenue from value-added tax (VAT), which taxes the value added to a product at each stage of production.
Local governments have fewer incentives to manipulate VAT revenue, since a large portion of it is eventually transferred to the central government, therefore overstating VAT would only increase fiscal revenue losses.
Premier Li Keqiang confirmed China had lowered its growth target for 2019 to a range of 6 to 6.5 per cent at the National People’s Congress on Tuesday. Photo:
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The authors found that since 2008, the official growth rate for industry and other sectors exceeded their corresponding VAT growth rate, with the gap widening over the past decade, indicating that the government was overstating official GDP.
In other words, the overstatement of official growth has worsened since 2008 and NBS’s corrections have been increasingly inadequate to offset bottom-up data exaggerations.
A similar conclusion was drawn when the authors examined and adjusted the official GDP growth data with a set of alternative indicators, including satellite images showing lights at night, national tax revenue, electricity consumption, railway cargo traffic, as well as imports and exports that are less likely to be over-reported, although these proxies did not fully capture the growing importance of the service sector in the economy in recent years.
Among all 31 Chinese provinces, Guangdong, Zhejiang, Beijing, and Shanghai appeared to have the highest data quality, based on the economists’ own calculations that were privately confirmed by NBS officials. The worst performing provinces included Tianjin, Liaoning and Inner Mongolia, all of which have been exposed as having exaggerated economic data in recent years.
The economists suggested that the problem is that much of the underlying data needed to project GDP is outside the NBS’s control, even though the agency has been trying hard to collect local data itself. At the same time, the NBS is also in a weak political position to confront local political leaders to demand better data collection.
Although the NBS adjusts downwards local statistics, it does not report the adjusted local statistics, perhaps out of a desire to not confront powerful local leaders.Report authors
“Although the NBS adjusts downwards local statistics, it does not report the adjusted local statistics, perhaps out of a desire to not confront powerful local leaders,” the authors said.
Since September, the NBS has named and shamed local governments on its website for manipulating data, but it remains to be seen if local governments fall in line.
In a post in January, the NBS said it had passed 14 cases of data falsification on to local governments before February 2018 but that it had not been updated even though local officials are required by law to punish those responsible for manipulating data within six months after receiving a notice of a violation.
The NBS’s ability to fix China’s GDP data problem is bound by its limited political power, the authors indicated.
“There are three problems with China’s GDP. One is that it doesn’t necessarily measure the right thing. Two is statistical bias in the way data is collected. Three is really a macro policy problem by the government which should write down all the bad debt,” said Michael Pettis, professor of finance at Peking University.
“The NBS is only trying to fix the second problem.”
CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 