How to Make China More Honest
China is far more economically open today than the Soviet Union was when its collapse surprised the U.S. policy community in 1991. Still, the Chinese Communist Party controls and manipulates the information it releases. The prevailing American view of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as a rising economic superpower, even if struggling a bit, is based on this poor information. American decision making requires considerably better data, so that policy can be based on actual conditions in the PRC.