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Just how far are China’s local officials going in falsifying performance data?
The cases are the clearest examples yet of the behaviour Beijing is targeting in its campaign on the ‘correct view of political performance’
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Alcott Weiin BeijingPublished: 10:00am, 30 Jun 2026Beijing has publicised three cases of local governments falsifying achievements to boost their records, which involved manipulating revenue data, misusing special-purpose government bonds and concealing off-balance-sheet debt.Chinese state news agency Xinhua reported on Sunday that a central working group and the Communist Party’s top anti-corruption watchdog had announced cases highlighting typical misconduct in official duties and performance evaluations.The announcement came from the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) and a working group responsible for an education campaign on the “correct view of political performance”, and put a spotlight on cases from the provinces of Gansu and Zhejiang, as well as Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region.
It said that Nanning, the regional capital of Guangxi, had falsely inflated its revenue for the 2024 financial year by 2.83 billion yuan (US$416.5 million). The city achieved this by assigning values ranging from 840,000 yuan to 500 million yuan to 15 plots of land that had originally been allocated to three state-owned enterprises for free.
These companies subsequently paid so-called land allocation fees to the local finance department, which recorded the funds as government revenue and then returned them to the companies under the guise of land expropriation compensation. One plot of land was used as many as 18 times in a series of transactions.
In another case, officials in the Xincheng district of Jiuquan, Gansu province were accused of labelling a landscape project as flood control and water pollution control infrastructure to fraudulently obtain 55.95 million yuan in ultra-long-term special treasury bonds issued in 2024.
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