Industrial Production in Communist China: 1957–1968

For the years before 1958, because Communist China published data on the physical output of a large number of industrial commodities, it was possible to construct an index of industrial production that could be used with confidence. As early as 1959, however, there was a noticeable drying up of official reports as a source of data and objective commentary and, since the collapse of the Leap Forward in 1960, the regime has imposed an almost complete blackout on the disclosure of specific economic facts and figures. As a result, the number of commodities for which physical output can be estimated has been reduced sharply, and the estimates are subject to a wide range of error.