All that Xi wants: China’s Ukraine dilemma

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. From London, I'm Jason Palmer.

And in New York, I'm John Fastman. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

There are lots of reasons that a country's tally of its COVID deaths might be inaccurate. Not every country counts in the same way. But there's doubtless also been some fiddling of the numbers and some new research shows how to spot it.

And an eternal how to reduce corruption. Well, countries can increase funding for anti corruption officers. They can make public spending more transparent. But some places are trying a much simpler solution. First up, though, Overnight Russian forces intensified their offensive in Kharkiv, Ukraine's second city. The city's police building was destroyed by a Russian missile strike. And this morning, Russia reported that it had seized control of the city of Kherson. Meanwhile, in America, President Biden announced further sanctions in his State of the Union address on Tuesday.

Tonight, I'm announcing that we will join our allies in closing off American airspace to all Russian flights, further isolating Russia and adding additional squeeze on their economy.

But in the days to come, what the world's second biggest economy does will be just as important. Last month, before Russia's invasion, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman urged both sides to refrain from escalating tensions. When the fighting began last week, China again called for all parties to find a diplomatic solution. And yesterday, China offered to play a role in peacemaking talks. But what it really wants is unclear. China is treading a fine line between trying to appear an honest broker and preserving a relationship with Russia that's stronger than it's been for decades.

The relationship between China and Russia is close, as it's been in 70 years. Russia and China have been growing closer for more than two decades now. But it took a big step forward on February 4th when Putin and Xi met in Beijing. As the Winter Olympics were about to begin.

Gotti Epstein is our China affairs editor.

They issued a joint statement that was rife with ideological language. They sort of claimed to be the guarantors of true or genuine democracy. And they derided other countries, unnamed countries that they said were determined to impose their democratic standards on other countries. So it was quite a striking kind of ideological statement. But the biggest leap that Xi Jinping took in that joint statement was he decided to sign on to Putin's opposition to the expansion of NATO. That was a first for China, and. And he was doing that just as Putin was massing troops on the border with Ukraine. This was a pivotal moment in China Russian relations, and it was a big risk for Xi.

So, Gotti, you talked about Russia and China's increasing closeness. I'm curious to what extent that closeness is a product of their relationship with America.

There is some element of them being pushed closer together by their sort of shared sense that they are being pressured by the west, or in Russia's case, Putin has gone on about this for years, about being threatened by NATO, by Western encirclement. And for its part, China feels very similar pressure in Asia and very similar pressure from America. But they also have a shared, to an extent, ideological view of the world. They are both authoritarians. Xi Jinping has spoken of how they view the world in a similar way. They view governance in a similar way. I think there is, if not deep trust, there is a genuine sense of aligned interests. Some of that is driven by how the west treats both countries. But a lot of it is sort of organic to China and Russia's political systems and their political outlooks and their ideological outlooks.

And Gotti, given that relationship, given those similar outlooks, what has China's response been to Russia's invasion?

Well, in its public statements so far, China has been trying to have it both ways, with language that can seem very tortured. They want to be seen as responsible actors, even as peacemakers, and have called repeatedly for de escalation and talks and offered to play a role in that. But they also use an all sides framing in lamenting the fighting. And they have repeatedly supported Russia's grievances and blamed the US and NATO for provoking Russia and making the situation worse. Even when Russia heightened the readiness of its nuclear forces, China found a way to blame NATO, not Putin. So now, as the war gets uglier, I think we'll hear more talk of China worrying about civilian casualties and hoping for peace. But it's important to pay close attention to the words China's diplomats speak in very precise language, and they have not come anywhere close to condemning Russia's actions, nor even use the word invasion to describe what Russia has done.

So Russia has had some exceptionally harsh sanctions imposed on it by Western powers, including sanctions on access to American technology, which will probably affect, I would think, a range of things in Russia, from the country's ability to build up a strong aerospace sector to weather individual Russian phones will work. Now, I would think that they turn to China to try to fill some of those gaps. Will China be able to fill them? Will it find itself with a greater role in Russia's development and economy than it has now?

I think the short answer is yes. I do think that China will be able to fill some of those gaps. Most of the business that flows between China and Russia will be unaffected by sanctions. I think you have Huawei, which of course has been the target of U.S. sanctions and export controls. They should be able to sell 5G technology to Russia, where Western competitors like Ericsson and Nokia will be locked out. China's development banks or policy banks can lend to Russian enterprises with little fear of running afoul of the financial sanctions that target commercial lending. And for years now, the two countries have been reducing their reliance on the dollar to settle trade, which is a conscious effort on the part of Russia to insulate itself from American sanctions.

So what does that mean? Does that mean they are somehow immune to these sorts of sanctions?

So, you know, the one kind of big area where there is a real question mark is in oil and gas. China purchases a tremendous amount of oil and gas from Russia. It's a majority of what they buy from Russia. But it's unclear whether the Biden administration really will ever take that step to bar the purchase of oil and gas from Russia in a way that could affect how China's transactions with Russia. It doesn't look like they're going to do that. It looks like the Biden administration is concerned about energy prices compounding inflation ahead of the midterms in November. And in fact, China could even increase its business with Russia in this regard. I mean, the suspension of Nord Stream 2 creates an opening for China to get a better deal negotiations over a pipeline project that they've been negotiating with Russia for a long time that would actually carry gas from the same fields that supply Europe. So you could even see more business between Russia and China in oil and gas.

So, Gadi, we're almost a week into this war. Do you think China knew what it was signing up for when Xi issued that joint statement with Putin.

Well, this is the big question out there for people watching China. What did she know and when did she know it, to coin a phrase. But I think it's hard to argue, as some have, that he was played, that he had no idea that Putin would actually go ahead and invade Ukraine. I think logic would dictate that China would have had to take into account at least the realistic possibility that Putin would follow through on what he was threatening to do. Putin has done so in the past. It's not like Xi Jinping is a stranger to Putin's methods or logic. Meanwhile, the evidence that some cite for the notion that China was taken by surprise is comically thin. We have to remember that it is in China's interest to not be seen as having any foreknowledge of the invasion or believing it was likely. And it, it serves their interest in the west to have this perception out there that even they were taken by surprise. And, and maybe they were, and maybe they will become more publicly and visibly uncomfortable with their position as the war drags on. But there's just no evidence to indicate that on February 4, Xi Jinping didn't know what he was doing.

Gotti, thanks so much for joining us.

It was great to be with you, John.

If you roll six dice on on average you'll get one six. But that average hides variation. Sometimes there'll be more, sometimes fewer. It's a quirk of mathematics that in a lot of cases the variation is itself pretty regular over a lot of throws. You know how many times to expect any result from 16 to 6 of them, too many or too few, and you know that your dice are loaded. Spotting odd looking variation has been a useful tool for sniffing out fraud in academic studies, business accounts and election tallies. Now some new research gives it another pandemic related use.

So essentially, even if you have a certain number of people dying on average per day, there should be some variation in those numbers. Some days more people die, some days fewer people die.

Sondre Solstad is a senior data journalist at the Economist.

So this new study looks at variation in daily COVID 19 death counts and it's looking at the death counts as reported by government, it's by a researcher called Dmitry Kubach. And what this paper looks at is when this variation is much too low and what that suggests about numbers being natural or somehow unnatural.

Where by unnatural you mean possibly fudged. I mean, how do you even work that out?

Yes. So what he's done is that he has looked at the deaths reported to the who, and then he has computed how much these numbers vary within weeks for every country and every week since the pandemic began. Now, he has then compared that variation to that of a common statistical distribution known as the Poisson, named after a French statistician, which is often used to model counts like these. And it has a mathematically very pleasing property, which is that the mean of the distribution should be equal to the variance. So how much numbers are higher or lower than the average is related to the average quite directly. And what he's saying is that if the variation is much less than the Poisson, something suspicious is going on.

And so comparing the numbers against that Poisson distribution is a fair test. To your mind, that's a good way to do it.

So in many ways, it's a very easy test, actually, because you would expect the distribution of death counts to be much more varying than a Poisson because you have things like super spreader events. You have weekday effects. There could be more deaths registered on a Monday as work from the weekend is picked up, and weekends could be more quiet as deaths take longer to process then. And so finding death counts that are distributed like a Poisson would actually be death counts that vary very little compared to what one might expect. Now, this is a pretty easy test, but Mr. Kubach made it easier still. Only failing a country if it had at least 15 weeks in total in which it failed this test or four consecutive weeks failing it.

Right. So if a country is faithfully reporting its numbers, then they should come out of this test, I guess, with flying colors. What did he find?

So he found that the vast majority of countries passed the test with flying colors and had no significant issue at all. So it's important to note that not failing this test is not proof that the numbers are accurate. All it says is that they did not have numbers that were obviously unnatural. So you could imagine that some countries could be tampering with these numbers, but just doing it in a very sophisticated way. Or is the case in most countries, especially those except the very richest ones, you could have limited testing, in which case the numbers would be much lower than they should be for that reason. However, some countries did fail this test, 17 in total. And Mr. Kubach believes that this suggests somewhat clumsy foul play.

So 17 countries fail what should have been an easy test. What does that look like? Give me an example.

So you could take Russia's numbers from August of last year as an example. There daily death tallies never went lower than 746 and never higher than 799 in the United States. By contrast, they ranged from about 100 to 2200 in the same period. Now, the number 799 also suggests a reason why some states might do this, which is to avoid crossing certain thresholds which might be politically sensitive. In any event, the Russian neatness continued into September. In that first week, they ranged from 792 to 799. So looking at those numbers from first week of September, you could do a little back of the envelope calculation and compare it to what one would expect. And one would expect such a number to appear about once every 2,700 years if these were the result of a Poisson process. And as said, we actually expect them to be varying more than that, naturally. So even less than 2,700 years would be the best expectation.

So this casts even more shadows then over the numbers that have been reported. We've known that death tolls have been undercount in a bunch of ways, except, of course, for the Economist's excess Death Tracker. This is even more reason to be suspect about numbers we see.

Yes, it does indeed. So, as you rightfully say, we've known for a long time now that the official COVID death counts are undercounts for the vast majority of countries. Now, what this suggests is that there is some sort of tampering with the numbers, too. Now, there are a range of justifications that are possible for this. The most innocent one would be some sort of bureaucratic bottleneck in processing death certificates. But even that would mean that the numbers on the worst days are lower than they should be, which obviously is not good. And the second thing is, it continues over the weekends. So whereas you see in many countries that drop in the weekends, these have stable numbers continuing pretty much every single day for long periods of time. The implication of that, at least according to the researcher doing the study, is that this is clumsy foul play in some form or another.

So it's plain in the numbers. This is undeniably sketchy.

Then I reached out to a professor of statistics at the University of Oxford to discuss this study. And there I spoke with David Steinsalz. He essentially told me that while he can't say anything about the motive behind these numbers appearing like they do, there seems to be no way they could be independent observations. So something is clearly going on. The list of suspicious countries are almost exclusively dictatorships without a free press. So one could suspect that since they do not have any independent news media to look at these numbers and question them, they feel More emboldened to tamper with them.

Thanks very much for your time, sandraj.

My pleasure, as always.

Corruption is a problem all over the world. You know this. We talk about graft all the time on the show. There are plenty of standard prescriptions for tackling it. Removing the incentives for bribery and backhanders. Shoring up transparency laws, punishing the bad apples harshly. But in some places, a far simpler approach seems to work.

Some countries are hiring more women to try and stamp out corruption.

Elise Burr writes about foreign affairs for the Economist.

In 2011, a state in Mexico hired an all female traffic police unit to tackle corruption. And Peru did something similar in the late 1990s.

Why are they doing that in a bid to stamp out corruption?

Well, in 2001, some researchers from the World bank published a study. It looked at 100 countries and it found that in places where there were a higher percentage of female legislators, officials were less likely to ask for bribes. And that set off other academics to look into this question. New research from a group of academics found that In China between 1979 and 2014, high level female bureaucrats were 81% less likely to be arrested than their male colleagues for corruption. The same study found that In Italy between 2000 and 2016, female bureaucrats were 22% less likely to be investigated for corruption.

And what's the idea behind this? Why is that gap there?

Well, one explanation is that women have fewer opportunities to take bribes or improperly wield connections. A lot of corruption thrives within old boys clubs, which tend to exclude women. Another explanation is that female politicians avoid corruption because they are punished more heavily for it. Malawi provides one example of this. New research finds that Joyce Banda, who was Malawi's president, may have been punished for corruption, more so than her male predecessors did for basically doing the same thing.

So the idea is not that women are less corrupt, they just simply have fewer chances or bear a greater risk if they get caught at it.

Right. The explanations are grounded in the reality that women have less power than men. So maybe in countries where the gender gap fades, we could see any corruption gap also fading. This has happened with women and general crime. In the past 50 years, women have become more criminal. That's in part because technological and social progress have allowed women to work outside the home, and that includes both working legally and illegally.

So the depressing conclusion is not that men are going to get less corrupt, but in time women will reach the same levels.

Yeah, it's possible. As the ranks of female officials grow and women find themselves on the same footing with men, stereotypes may fade and women might even start establishing their own old girls clubs.

Thanks very much for joining us, Elise.

Thanks for having me, Jason.

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