> Would anyone in rural China tell a government surveyor they were dissatisfied with their government-supplied job? I doubt it. Of course they would if they ca

> Would anyone in rural China tell a government surveyor they were dissatisfied with their government-supplied job? I doubt it. Of course they would if they can. Those are two different governments: the government-supplied job is supplied by the local government, while the surveyor is sent by the provincial or central government. Complaining to them about the local government is an opportunity to have the central government step in and rectify the issue. Of course local governments know that as well, and to avoid having people tell on them, they use all kinds of tricks to deceive the surveyors. Depthpaper magazine published an investigative report last year https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/hXPd-mFNnnxQheR7tB64WQ https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/hXPd-mFNnnxQheR7tB64WQ on a particular case where the local government was ordered to stop trying to interfere (so their deception failed). One thing they did was to find out in advance which households would be visited, and then they handed out various goods bought in advance, to make it look like that family had been enjoying a relatively high standard of living for quite some time. Since the central government's success rate at detecting cheating local governments is probably not that high, I expect that there are still a lot of counties that are officially above the poverty line but actually still below it.