Yesterday Google revealed a campaign to steal users’ passwords that “appeared” to originate in China. This, though denied today by the Chinese government, is hardly the first time that China has been accused of various “cyber-crimes”. All I can say is that if China has access to this state of the art cyberknowledge then some of it would be helpfully re-directed to official websites which are frustratingly inefficient. The China Statistical Yearbook doesn’t work in Chrome and only allows you to download one table at a time in Excel. The National Bureau of Statistics help facility is not at all helpful. And on that site the link to the Ministry of Finance is broken.
I appreciate that these sites may work very well in Chinese but these are trivial problems which nonetheless reflect poorly on the PRC. China is both the world’s second largest economy (possibly the largest now at purchasing power parity exchange rates) and yet in it its own description a developing economy. Other, poorer countries nonetheless have superior statistical websites.
Leave a Reply