My impression is that in the PRC such information distortion is quite common due to the incentives provincial officials and party cadres face in the promotion system, etc. The consequences of this principal-agent problem were far more serious this time. @gerardrolanducb https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1246027057806671872

When thinking about the PRC's #s recently, of the three reasons to suspect undercount [1 Technical problems with testing (we see that in many places) 2 Principal-agent problem 3 Deception by the top] I gave positive weight to all three, but suspected 2 was most important.

Last week's The Economist had a good example of a subspecies of this kind of principal-agent problem known as Goodhart's Law. https://www.economist.com/china/2020/03/26/china-goes-back-to-work

The image of authoritarian/totalitarian regimes is that the center is omniscient bc it has informants everywhere & it thereby uses info to further its own objectives. This is incomplete: the center is often systematically misinformed by perversely incentivized lower levels.

Some of the more disturbing examples of this dynamic come from denunciations by ordinary people. Often people denounce their neighbors for reasons of personal gain rather than bc they share the goals of the regime. Result is "misdirected" (from regime perspective) persecution.

@SKalyvas's book "The Logic of Violence in Civil War" gives many examples of this sort of "malicious denunciation." Paradigmatic case (from Sheila Fitzpatrick): denunciations aimed at evicting neighbors from crowded communal apartments in Stalinist USSR. https://www.amazon.com/Violence-Cambridge-Studies-Comparative-Politics/dp/0521670047

To be clear: deception of the outside world by the top may be a factor here. And for the principal-agent screw-up, the principal is to blame for setting up the perverse incentive scheme. Either way, the buck stops at the top of the CCP.