Chinese Town Cheats on Happiness Survey

(Creative photo by Paul Burns/Getty Images)

Danwei has a great post about a Chinese town in Nanjing who sent their residents 16 answers to questions that they would be receiving in an upcoming provincial phone survey on whether the province had met targets to improve their citizen's well-being.

Apparently the town of Shiqiao told their residents that when asked how much their family income was, residents should all say 8,000 Chinese yuan. And when asked how they'd measure their own happiness on a 100-point scale, their answer should be between 90 and 100.

To top it off, there was a telephone outage in only the poorer areas on the day the phone survey took place, causing the Nanjing Morning Post to investigate. Danwei's translation of the report is simultaneously hilarious and sad. Take this exchange between the reporter and the town's vice-secretary:

Reporter: For many rural households, this looks like inflated accounting. A pig, for example, is worth 1,000 yuan once it's raised. You count that as income. But there's also the cost of raising it which, once you subtract it out, may leave a household with just 200 yuan in income. Or a cow, which is worth 5,000 yuan, may take four or five years to raise, so isn't it a little inappropriate to figure that into the annual income for 2008?

Vice-Secretary: Um...