Relationship between different data gathering agencies

Currently, three government agencies, the State Statistical Bureau, the State Family Planning Commission and the Ministry of Public Security, manage the five sources of data in population statistics. Not surprisingly, the differing departmental positions, domestic political considerations, or even international politics, all affect the data collection operations and quality of data.

It appeared that MPS passively treated population statistics as a by-product of its administered hukou registration system, owing to its priority of maintaining social order and controlling population mobility. Compared to the other two government agencies, the MPS had more bureaucratic inertia in updating their regulations and statistics, which partly resulted from a lack of human resources. On the other hand, both the SSB and SFPC put much effort to collecting population statistics. As parallel government departments, the SSB and SFPC had respective functions and responsibilities, and collected data through different channels. Meanwhile, they also had a co-operative, though sometimes competitive, relationship during the past two decades.

Since its establishment in 1952, the SSB had experienced ups and downs closely related to China’s political-economic environment before 1978 (Banister 1987). In the 1980s, the independence and accuracy of statistics attracted wide attention as economic development and the SSB began to play more important roles. A Statistical Law was enacted in late 1983 and took effect on 1 January 1984. Its primary task was to collect timely and accurate economic statistics serving development purposes, while collecting population statistics was just one of many SSB functions. After successfully conducting the 1982 census, the SSB and provincial statistical bureaus

started to organise annual surveys to generate the official demographic estimates. From the starting point, the birth figures estimated from annual surveys exceeded those recorded in the family planning statistics. These discrepancies would suggest failures both in the family planning program and the family planning statistics under SFPC administration, and consequently resulted in conflicts between the two departments in the 1980s.

The SFPC has been pursuing its own statistical course since the early 1980s. Besides the routine family planning statistics and quinquennial retrospective surveys, it also attempted to organise sample survey annually in the 1980s, which was aborted mainly because of shortages of economic and human resources (Scharping 2003). In the 1980s, the successful performance of the SFPC in the 1982 one-per-thousand survey and 1988 two-per-thousand survey made it reluctant to use the SSB sources to evaluate the program performance, despite its awareness of serious underreporting of births in the program statistics (Chang 1992). But this situation was changed by the 1990 census, which demonstrated the problems in all other population statistics. Shortly after that, the then State Councillor Li Tieying, who was the top leader in charge of family planning, asked the SFPC to stop competition and use the SSB data. Thereafter, the SFPC finally decided to shift to rely upon SSB sources to monitor and evaluate the program progress in 1991 (Peng 1992). During the 1990s, each year the SSB released official estimates of births that far exceeded the family planning statistics, an average of 7 million from 1991 to 2000. Certainly, not all provincial family planning commissions were satisfied with this, and some of them continually protested against using the annual survey as an evaluation reference (see Cai and Zhang 2000).

The SSB was also frustrated by the 1990 census results, which demonstrated the huge shortages in the estimated annual number of births in annual surveys from 1982 to 1990 (Hu 1994). During the 1990s the SSB paid much attention in improving data quality, including changing survey procedures to carry out post-enumeration. Meanwhile, the SSB no longer published official series of total fertility, but the adjusted CBR series instead. However, in the latter half of the 1990s, the gap between the observed and adjusted fertility became increasingly wider, as mentioned in Chapter 1. Besides, the SSB statisticians became defensive about the accuracy and

completeness of their statistics. With respect to causes for such a surprising gap, the SSB statisticians tended to ascribe blame primarily to the family planning program, and suggested an increasingly worse situation (Zhang and Cui 2003).

There was another story for the SFPC in the 1990s. Frustrated by the fertility fluctuations in the preceding decade, the SFPC was eager to see a further decline of fertility in the early 1990s. However, the suspicions about data quality by demographers and international concerns of program coercion, made it very cautious in publicly discussing low fertility. In certain cases, such as the Country Report in international conferences, the Chinese government declared that China’s fertility was 1.8 after the mid-1990s and early this century (Government of PR China 1994; Government of PR China 2002). Nevertheless, there was accumulating evidence indicating an accelerated decline of fertility after the 1992 survey. This offered the SFPC some confidence to initiate a shift in program priority at least in eastern provinces in response to the ICPD recommendations (Gu 2000; Zhang et al. 1996). In the late 1990s, the SFPC became increasingly confident in talking about its achievement in family planning, and the Chinese government set the goal of family planning as stabilising low fertility in the new century (CPC Central Committee and State Council 2000).

Meanwhile, given the experience of fertility upsurge after the 1984 policy adjustment, the SFPC was practically concerned about that any relaxation either in policy or in implementation could lead to a fertility rebound. On the other hand, the caution of the SFPC partly resulted from the concerns of underreporting of births, and partly resulted from the concerns of its institutional position. If the fertility was as low as observed and had been maintained for a period, this would be unfavourable to the existence of the SFPC as an independent government department (Yu 2002).