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Offering data on everything from the number of households with washing machines, to the price of eggs and the use of commemorative stamps, China’s annual statistical compendium is now available — with one catch.
The 919-page yearbook, compiled by the National Bureau of Statistics and on sale for just over Rmb400 ($56), has not yet been released online and can only be bought in its hardback edition.
The book, which weighs 2.6kg, is both a remnant of an earlier era and an enduring symbol of China’s approach to official data. Comprehensive and dense, it documents the country’s development by focusing on everything from the number of acrobatic, magic and circus performances (61,000) to beneficiaries of work injury insurance per region (245,000 in Guangdong province).
“The yearbook means something to people who follow China,” said Louis Kuijs, chief economist for Asia Pacific at S&P Global Ratings. “It’s more special in China than probably it has been in other countries.”
The National Bureau of Statistics first began compiling its main annual yearbook as its command economy reopened to global trade in the 1980s and international analysts were keen for data. But such texts have been around for much longer.
“I think you’re looking at the instinctive archival tendencies of Chinese government,” said Bruce Reynolds, emeritus professor of economics at the University of Virginia.
He recalls statistical yearbooks being “extremely valuable” in the 1970s when doing research on 1950s China. “There were 31 economic ministries, including nine ministries of machine building,” he said. “Each one of those had a tongji nianjian [annual yearbook].”
“A lot of these [data] are about production,” added Kuijs, who worked for the World Bank in Beijing from 2004 to 2011, of past and present editions.
In China’s 2025 compendium, data ranges from the amount of algae-related products produced in Liaoning province (536,000 tonnes) to the total drainage area of all the inland rivers in Inner Mongolia (311,378 sq km) and the total exports of live animals ($488mn).
The country also produces others across sectors and regions, such as rural and education yearbooks, providing a window into an economy where official statistics have come under intense international scrutiny for decades.
Today analysts can typically get such data on platforms such as Bloomberg or Wind, and several said they no longer use the hard copy. But some still relish a version that centralises details such as empty shipping containers in Hong Kong and per capita pork consumption (28.1kg). “It has the most complete data,” said one researcher at a consultancy in Beijing.
The book is mainly sold through the ecommerce platform Taobao. In previous years some entrepreneurial individuals have harvested data from the physical edition and then resold it on Taobao in Excel or PDF form. “Some data are nice to read from the book setting,” said one Chinese economist based overseas, who bought several PDF versions last year from Taobao for “a few yuan”.
For Kuijs, certain parts of the book, especially the input-output tables listed on pages 84-97, still work better on paper. “It’s almost impossible to have a picture of that if you don’t have the physical tables in front of you,” he said. “For certain things, it’s still nice to have.”
Elsewhere, yearbooks are gradually disappearing in physical form. Germany’s version, which statisticians said “has represented our work for almost seven decades”, was discontinued at a press conference in 2019.
For Reynolds, one yearbook statistic that comes to mind is interwoven with China’s history and the pressures on agriculture in the 1980s. “There was a lot of talk that the grain harvest was going to plunge, they were allowing people to leave the fields,” he said. “I made a prediction they would hit 400mn tons in 1985; they hit 400mn tons in 1984, that’s why I remember that number.”
Additional contributions by Tina Hu in Beijing
