At the outset of reform, China, a poor nation with limited development of information
resources, nonetheless possessed a statistical system that provided its government with a wide
array of reasonably accurate quantitative information about economic activity within China’s
enormous land mass.2 This was partly a reflection of a long tradition of literacy and recordkeeping,
and partly the result of sustained effort on the part of China’s socialist state.
China’s pre-reform statistical system produced information that, except for the epidemic
of false reporting linked with the Great Leap Forward of 1958-60, withstood scrutiny from an
often skeptical international community. Nevertheless, China entered the reform period with
important limitations on its capacity to produce timely, accurate, and useful measures of the level,
composition, and growth of economic activity.
At the start of reform, the primitive state of China’s information and communication
industries restricted statistical capabilities. Implementation of new technologies linked to
telecommunications and computers have rapidly eroded the limitations on statistical capabilities
imposed by inadequate "hardware," which receive no further discussion here.