China's propaganda authorities revealed that data on rice production and other activities is severely inflated by local leaders who are under pressure to create the illusion of prosperity and growth whether it exists or not. Officials in Beijing fault their underlings for failing to "seek truth from facts," but it is Beijing's "food security" measures that are based on "facts" from the last century. China actually produces too much rice, so there is no need to pile unrealistic rice-planting quotas on village leaders and farmers.
A July 14 Central China TV broadcast reported shocking discrepancies between reported rice cultivation and actual figures in Jianghua County of Hunan Province. While fields along the highway were planted in rice as dictated by quotas handed out to each town and village, a drone flight revealed that fields hidden behind hills were actually planted in cash crops. After checking the ledgers, the reporter found that a village's actual area planted in rice was about 60% of the area that village officials had reported to their superiors to show that they had met production targets. According to the report, village officials fabricated rice fields to meet the quota they had been assigned. Two of three "big rice farmers" on the list who had grown 200 mu (about 33 acres) of rice were actually village leaders who filled out the forms and fabricated the fields.
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| This Hunan village had a few isolated rice paddies surrounded by "cash crops", at odds with reports of rice planting submitted to upper level authorities. |
State media blasted the fabrication as "growing grain on paper" and a "numbers game." They excoriated the local leaders for their data fabrication and criticized them for promoting their own interests while sacrificing national "food security."
Authorities have known about rice data fabrication for decades. They are revealing it now because it supports a wider campaign to deflect blame away from Beijing's leaders to immoral local officials as corruption and chaos grows and the public grows impatient with the breakdown of the economic-prosperity-for-totalitarianism social contract.
Peoples Daily revealed last week that central authorities are highlighting data fabrication, "image projects," and "superficial rectifications" in connection with the launch of China's new 2026-2030 five-year plan. Peoples Daily intoned that "such issues are being highlighted frequently" because "there is absolutely no room for falsification in the work of driving development." They did not mention that the prevalence of fake data and inability of leaders to steer the economy undermine the 5-year plan's aim to promote a digital economy with "precise" management.
News media have blasted other examples of local mismanagement, fraud, and image projects. The Central Disciplinary Commission's special office for "Curbing Formalism and Reducing the Burden on the Grassroots" highlighted bad actors in two cities in Fujian Province that submitted data on behalf of reporting entities; distributed "guidance figures" in sealed envelopes; created fake approval documents so projects could be included in statistical databases; and required enterprises to inflate their reported output to show an increase from the previous year.
A commentary by a communist party official kicked off the media campaign in April by citing examples of empty "performance by the numbers": Henan Province officials reported inflated funding received for a construction project; the mayor of a city in Guangxi built 7 light rail lines without approval from the central government that were never completed and left behind massive debt; an industrial park in Hunan Province devoted to baby strollers claimed to have 60 companies but had only 1, and its output value that was less than 10% of what was reported. Likewise, Peoples Daily cited localities in Yunnan Province fabricating data to meet targets and localities in Jiangsu Province that padded foreign trade figures--even "purchasing" export data from other regions to boost their rankings.
Peoples Daily puts the blame for statistical fraud squarely on local officials. The reports draw a line between honest central leaders and self-centered local leaders who ignore warnings about statistical fraud. The disciplinary commission's report implicitly exonerated the National Bureau of Statistics by claiming that the local officials ignored fraud pointed out by the Bureau. According to Peoples Daily, the "root cause" is local official' "lack of integrity," and a "flawed view of political achievement." Its solution is to guide Party members to deeply internalize loyalty to the Party, a correct view of achievement, and ensuring that seeking truth and pragmatism become conscious commitments. The reports mention "burdens on the grass roots" as a euphemism for the Chinese public's impatience with mismanagement.
A Peoples Daily commentary specifically on the rice story pretends that inflated rice planting data constitutes a food security crisis. The article professes an interest in looking at the underlying reasons driving data falsification but fails to actually zoom in on the absurdity of China's food security policy and the outdated thinking behind it. Several articles acknowledge that rice production quotas issued to villages were unreasonable, but the prescriptions recommended are to start even more investigations, increase punishments for faking data, incorporate even more Big Brother-style electronic monitoring and surveillance, and publicize the 1.8-billion-mu "red line" for grain land.
The propagandists demand that local officials adopt "systems thinking" and base decisions on data, but it is Beijing's food security policy that is based on the outdated notion that Chinese people still subsist on rice, noodles and steamed bread as they did during the last century. An honest assessment of market conditions shows that the dictates and quotas issued by Beijing are bone-headed measures based on outdated talking points from 40 years ago.
Rice data have been inflated for a long time. In 2025 the Statistics Bureau said the country produced 209 million metric tons of rice, but the Food and Commodity Reserves Administration said only 116 mmt of rice was procured by various types of enterprises. That's a difference of 40%.
Regardless of what the number is, consumption of staple foods is declining, and China actually produces surpluses of rice and wheat. These grains are often used as animal feed. Wheat and rice prices are falling because supply exceeds demand.
In 2025, China's food and commodity reserve bureau said 5 million metric tons of rice were purchased at the minimum price to prevent prices from falling--a surplus. Other rice is purchased for conventional reserves. Because demand for rice is so weak, once rice is stored in reserves it tends to stay there until it is degraded. Since March this year, authorities have offered 10.1 million metric tons of rice from reserves at weekly auctions and sold 983,724 metric tons. Most of the rice offered for sale had been in reserves for 4 years. Secret auctions were held this Spring to sell inedible rice to feed mills.
Chinese rice prices have been declining over the past decade--another indicator of surplus. Chinese prices of long-grain rice exceed prices in neighboring countries by about $200 per metric ton in most years. The spread narrowed during some years such as 2020 and 2023. Medium grain rice prices are slightly higher than long-grain prices. Prices in Chinese currency have also been relatively stagnant since 2015.
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| Monthly data compiled from UN Food and Agriculture Organization, GIEWS database. |
China imports 2-to-3 metric tons of semi-milled rice in most years and usually exports a similar volume. The volume imported goes up and down from year to year according to the relative prices of Chinese and imported rice. In addition to semi-milled rice, China also imports about 500,000 metric tons to 1 million metric tons of broken rice when the price is low. Broken rice is used as animal feed, mixed into bags of retail rice to cut cost, or used for industrial processing.
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| Chinese customs data. Calendar years. |
Despite having prices that are higher than in other countries, rice production is not profitable. The Chinese government's cost of production survey for rice shows that profits from growing rice have shrunk to essentially zero.
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| China National Development and Reform Commission data. |
The TV investigation of rice production in Hunan said that China has over a dozen subsidies to incentivize rice production, including a target price subsidy for rice, a soil fertility subsidy, a subsidy for double cropping, a seed subsidy, subsidized insurance, subsidized machinery, and subsidies for seed producers and seedling nurseries. The TV broadcast said total subsidy payments reach 400-to-500 yuan per mu, about 33% of the gross value of output reported by the cost of production survey.
Arguably, village officials and farmers are the ones who have been "seeking truth from facts", cutting back on production of unprofitable rice and diversifying into more profitable crops with growing demand. High level officials pile on
Moreover, top officials have been issuing contradictory dictates. Among the crops grown by farmers in Hunan--according to the TV expose--was "monk fruit", used as Chinese herbal medicine. This crop follows a separate rural development strategy preached by agricultural officials: growing regional specialty crops like monk fruit to create value-added industry chains. Another "cash crop" grown by the Hunan farmers is taro, another crop encouraged by agricultural officials who declared tuber crops will be classified as staple food grains.
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| Monk fruit, a medicinal herb that Hunan farmers were criticized for growing in place of rice. This appears to be packaged for the American market. |
The myopic focus on rice ignores the diversification of the Chinese food system. Consider the growth in use of cassava (tapioca)--once a subsistence crop in Guangxi and Guangdong but now a commodity widely used as a starch in food processing and other industries, for distilling alcohol, and to make the little white globs in bubble tea. Last year, China imported 10.5 million metric tons of cassava and cassava starch. China has no production data on cassava, but my guess is that it's under 2 mmt, suggesting 15% or less self-sufficiency. Reliance on Thailand and Vietnam for cassava imports is never discussed as a food security problem.
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