Headlines blare that the United States has now surpassed China and every other country in the world in confirmed coronavirus cases. As my American Enterprise Institute colleague Derek Scissors points out, there is absolutely no reason to trust Chinese government statistics, especially as communist authorities in Beijing have repeatedly lied, obfuscated, and have every reason to cover-up the true number of cases they battle.
For any journalist or politician to cite Chinese government figures suggests a credulity that undercuts the entirety of their work.
Alas, China is the exception rather than the rule. Every few years, the Islamic Republic of Iran holds elections, and like clockwork, a few handpicked journalists report from hotels in the affluent neighborhoods of central and northern Tehran that millions of Iranians have gone to the polls, and they repeat government statistics about high voter turnout. The Iranian regime counts on this to project an image of popular legitimacy. But dig a little deeper, and the statistics make no sense.
There is a certain irony when fact-checkers pour over every statistic American politicians cite but take at face value those provided by autocratic regimes. To judge cities and towns across Iran from a hotel room in northern Tehran is equivalent to opining on local attitudes in Omaha, Nebraska, or Little Rock, Arkansas, from the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
In the West Bank and Gaza, journalists and diplomats also take at face value the often imaginary numbers provided by Palestinian spokesmen. A decade ago, Israeli demographer Yakov Faitelson published a damning analysis in the Middle East Quarterly of Palestinian demographic statistics and how they appeared in many ways to be wholly arbitrary but yet were gobbled up by credulous diplomats up to and including former Secretary of State John Kerry. In Gaza, the often desperate figures cited by Hamas leaders often conflict with metrics determined by more impartial organizations. No journalist can operate in Gaza without hiring a Hamas fixer (yet curiously few outlets report this arrangement in their news coverage). They understand what might occur if they stray from official lines or question numbers their designated interlocutors provide.
Then, there was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Remember the calumny about 500,000 Iraqi children dying because of sanctions? That originated when UNICEF, prevented from doing their own research in Iraq, accepted at face value statistics provided by Saddam’s government. When the Food and Agriculture Organization conducted their own study, they found the leading cause of death in Iraq at the time to be diabetes and heart disease, hardly the ailments of starvation.
More than two decades ago, while a State Department intern in Tajikistan, the head of Tajikistan’s statistics organization was blunt: He often made up the statistics included in his reports. “Give me more computers and funding, and I will give you more real statistics,” he said.
Without a doubt, the Trump administration fumbled the initial response to the Wuhan coronavirus. Part of the reason for that is the dysfunction of U.S. bureaucracy across administrations, part is peculiar to President Trump, and part is because too many officials believed what Chinese authorities reported.
To believe Chinese statistics and use them to condemn the U.S. response in comparison to China’s, however, is not only ignorant but highlights an increasingly significant problem where their statistics are treated as gold. In reality, statistics from autocratic regimes aren’t worth their weight in sawdust.
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official.
