China's Numbers Man

 Gan Li’s statistics on the economy just won’t toe the party line

 “What he found fundamentally changes the way we think”

- Dexter Roberts, With Xiaoqing Pi

Economist Gan Li and his researchers at Chengdu’s Southwestern University of Finance and Economics are gearing up for their national survey of Chinese households, which begins in early July. The aim of the biennial census is to measure the wealth of China’s 1.4 billion people—how much they earn, how many apartments they own, and how much land they have and how they use it. Bankers, economic analysts, property developers, and policymakers are eager to see what the survey will reveal.

The now much anticipated project almost suffered a premature death in 2012 after it exposed how Chinese society had become one of the most unequal in the world. Gan’s survey showed that China’s Gini coefficient, a measure of income inequality, had reached 0.61, well above the 0.4 level widely considered destabilizing by economists. The top 1 percent held more than one-quarter of China’s wealth, while 430 million Chinese struggled day-to-day.

Less than 24 hours after Gan released the news, six cadres from the National Bureau of Statistics descended on his Survey and Research Center for China Household Finance. They demanded the data. The economist wondered whether he’d be shut down. His fears proved unfounded: “They found no errors,” he says. “A few days later, someone told me we should be OK.”