[VLM]

There is a simpler failure mode, the guy who decides what numbers to report, and how, decides the outcome, and the data from China is more corrupt than our own data, which in turn is more corrupt than the data from the USSR Pravda era.

On a small scale its fox guarding the henhouse corporate metric evaluations. You pick the winners and losers, and by how much, then you design todays metric to match the conclusion, then you use numerological processes to gather numbers for the metric. Thats the way the real world works.