Getting the numbers right
Late last year, Liu Xi left her advertising job in Beijing to take care of her sick father in their hometown, a village in eastern Jiangsu province. Little did she know that she would end up being recruited to help with what is perhaps China’s largestever collection of public data.
In theory, the population census is the best source of statistics on China, since the polling is conducted once a decade and requires millions of boots on the ground to collect information about people’s backgrounds and whereabouts.
The top leadership will rely heavily on the resulting data for policy planning over the next decade, and this puts pressure on those at all levels of the collection process to get it right.
To that end, Beijing set a mandatory quota of self-reporting in certain areas when the 2020 census was conducted in November and December. In the past, authorities had relied solely on trained census takers – many of whom are government employees – to go door to door, collecting information.
“My understanding is that this [inclusion of self-reporting] is to ensure the accuracy of data,” said Liu. “If you ask census takers to do everything, they could be lazy and randomly input information.”
After a month-long delay, the census results will be released today, according to the country’s statistics bureau. The data was originally scheduled to come out in early April, but it was pushed back twice – first until the end of last month, and then until an “indefinite” future date.
All of the public’s answers to census questions were submitted via a system hosted by WeChat for Business, a platform developed by Chinese tech giant Tencent.
For self-reporting, people used their smartphones to scan a QR code assigned to each household by census takers – or enumerators – and this brought up a list of 12 questions accessed via WeChat.
Those dozen questions made up the short-form census survey that everyone was required to complete.
But there was also a longer survey with 17 additional questions – 29 in total – that about 10 per cent of the total population was asked to complete. The long-form survey included more specific questions pertaining to births, employment and working hours, among others.
Soon after Liu’s village started the census process in November, the 30-year-old discovered her ability to navigate a smartphone was an essential skill. As ubiquitous as WeChat is in China, few elderly residents in rural areas know how to use its various functions beyond making phone calls.
“For old people, smartphone ring tones aren’t loud enough. The fonts are too small. The functions are too complicated,” she said. “At best, they might know how to make video calls with their children.”
Yet, Liu’s hometown was among those tasked with meeting a self-reporting quota, at a rate of 30 per cent. This initially proved daunting, as there had been only one official census taker assigned to collect information on about 5,000 people. That was where Liu came in – she was recruited to help on the self-reporting side, which involved about 1,500 people.
So, at 8am every day for more than a week, Liu went to the local government office to collect preprepared information on local households. She would proceed to pound the pavement, knocking on doors and asking people if they had WeChat installed on their phones, then walking them through the self-reporting process. It was slow-going at first.
But after a few days, she found a more efficient way to get people’s attention: the village loudspeaker.
“Later we just announced, via the speaker: ‘The country needs your cooperation now. If you have a phone, a smartphone with WeChat, please bring your phone to us and gather at this place. There will be prizes if you come early. No prize if you come late. You must comply’,” Liu said.
But actually, she admitted, they “didn’t have to do it”.
“Self-reporting is done on a voluntary basis, but rural villages don’t have many people. If we don’t say something like this, no one will come,” she explained.
“So you have to offer some prizes. Rural people are simple. If you give someone a one-yuan bucket, he will be happy. But you can’t disclose the prizes beforehand, because if you say the prize is a bucket, some people may not come if they don’t want one.”
Once they managed to “coax” people out of their homes, Liu would take their phones and help them fill out the census questionnaires before handing their phones back to complete the selfreporting process with their signatures. In addition to cheap buckets, they also handed out other household items and food, including aprons, eggs and fruit.
It was a time-consuming process. In a single day, Liu was able to assist about 30 households, and most had multiple family members, even though some no longer lived there. The vast majority of migrant workers who live and work in larger cities still hold their household registration document – known as hukou – in their rural hometowns where they were born.
For her effort, local officials paid Liu 1,000 yuan (HK$1,200).
“Rural people don’t take privacy issues as seriously as urban residents,” she said. “The village cadres were there the whole time, and when someone did not cooperate or someone asked to verify my identity, the cadres would vouch for me, and the problem would be resolved.”
Several hundred miles away, in a middle-class neighbourhood in the city of Hangzhou in eastern Zhejiang province, Xie Fei, a retired cadre who had worked on the previous two censuses – in 2000 and 2010 – was one of 21 canvassers collecting basic information from nearly 8,000 residents in the community.
Xie said there was no quota for self-reporting in her community, and she hardly had any trouble finding people.
“I am in a lot of WeChat groups with our residents. If I don’t bump into them, I will share with them a QR code to access the census by themselves,” Xie said.
“But if we don’t know them and have never met them, we might ask the local police to call them and arrange a time for me to visit again. Most people are cooperative. I’ve done this three times and have rarely encountered uncooperative individuals.”
And this time around, officials said the coronavirus actually made it easier to track down residents for the census.
In the early days of the pandemic last year, every community across China was closely monitored by local cadres, who were tasked with tracking down people’s whereabouts to prevent the spread of the virus. They ended up with a lot of information they would not have otherwise had, and this helped streamline the census process when it began months later.
“To be frank, without the pandemic, it would have taken a lot more time to finish the census,” Liu said. “I heard from rural cadres that they collected a great deal of information from households during the pandemic. This provided a good base for conducting the census.”
But while the data collection itself may have been easier, that was not the end of Liu’s responsibilities, as her hometown was later selected for a random audit because there were discrepancies between the information they had gathered and that in government databases, such as people being unaccounted for.
Liu then had to go over the personal information for all 5,000 people with a fine-tooth comb, looking for mistakes. In a few instances, there was no formal record of people who had died.
“We stayed up two nights,” she said. “Our rural officials couldn’t provide much help, but they did bring us beef stew to eat in the office.”
My understanding is that [self-reporting] is to ensure the accuracy of data LIU XI, CENSUS TAKER
If we don’t know them and have never met them, we might ask the local police to call them and arrange a time for me to visit again. Most people are cooperative. I’ve done this three times and have rarely encountered uncooperative individuals XIE FEI, RETIRED CADRE