Deconstruction Critique “Chinese GDP equivalents” interactive map

Link: http://www.economist.com/content/chinese_equivalents

I choose the interactive web map from The Economist website. It compares Chinese provinces with other countries on GDP, GDP per person, population, and exports. This map shows the nearest equivalent countries to each province. First, the map designer acquired the original GDP and population data for each Chinese province and each country in the world. These data may be from WTO, China’s National Statistics Department and CEIC. Furthermore, to see the data clearly and conveniently, the designer processed these data to correct to one decimal. Then, he used the GDP to divide by population in order to get GDP per person. However, some data may be not credible. Some Chinese provinces may exaggerate their output: the sum of their reported GDPs is 10% higher than the national total. The designer also amended these data to let the overstatement is modest. After parsing and filtering data, he matched Chinese provinces to the nearest countries in order to make the “country equivalents” interactive map.

There are total four maps which focus on four different indexes. The first one is about GDP, the second one talks about GDP per person, the third one is focused on population, and the last one emphasizes exports. For each map, the designer used five colors to divide five levels from low to high. Then he labeled each relevant country on each Chinese province directly. When users click on each province, they can get detailed information about this province and applicable country on the same index. On the right side, there is a histogram distribution to show the ranking for each Chinese province. Different index brings different ranking, for example, even though Inner Mongolia sits in the middle of GDP ranking, it has a high GDP per person ranking. This histogram is better and clearer to show the regional inequality between each province.

The map designer compared the economy of the Chinese provinces to other world’s countries. His aim may be to highlight China’s economic power. The data for this map were collected in 2010 and this map was published in 2011. As we all know, during this period, many countries were experiencing a global economic crisis. On the contrary, China still kept the fast economic growth. Then lots of people including economists, government officials and this map designer, may have an optimistic expectation for future Chinese economy. Some of them even advocate China will replace the US to become the strongest economic country in the world. However, after 2014, the speed of Chinese economic development started to slow down. Many problems arose and were enlarged. For example, the gap of wealth, the structure of economic development sector, and the local governmental debt. Actually, these problems had occurred already in 2010, but the designer did not pay more attention to these problems. Thus, this GDP contrastive map cannot response the real economic development of China at that time, it only can show China’s huge economic quantity. In other words, this GDP per capital adjusted by PPP (purchasing power parity) cannot reflect China’s true economic power. Thus, this map’s representation does not link the reality.

To mend this map better in order to let the public know the real Chines economic power rationally. I think the designer should consider each Chinese province’s governmental debt and effective economic investment. GDP figures are useful but are often misleading. The figure that matters is the net “profits” an economy generates and not just the market value of what it sells. In addition, when taking Chinese province to compare to other countries, this metaphorical shows powerful Chinese economy and good development prospect. From my opinion, it is better and more rational to compare Chinese province to other countries’ states. Finally, for me, this kind of comparison is not meaningful, because after all, the average in china is still very low and there are still lots of people in poor. These attractive economic data cannot cover Chinese economic development problems. While if contrast the imbalance in regional development in China, it will be more significant.