I had thought the same but I'm still wondering if it was a proxy to cover something else (ex. ability to pay debt obligations) that would have had ramifications in the global market
I'll be interested to see if this leads to a massive shakeup in local politics from Beijing. I can't imagine they're pleased with the amount of doctored data (unless they already knew and were using it to appear stronger on a global scale)
It is today but things like lower-skilled manufacturing have a way of moving quickly to the lowest cost locale. Anecdotally from relationships with a few hardware companies (US & EU) there has been an increasing shift out of China for as wages have gone up on the mainland
tl;dr: The 'market' for guardianship is largely unmonitored by governing bodies and prone to abuses as told through personal anecdotes of individuals who have been taken advantage of.
Not to editorialize but this is scary for someone who lives abroad and has older parents and frankly makes me furious that we can let this happen
tldr: Most people who respond to surveys asking about the efficacy of the program are sober and skew the results, the anonymity of people in programs makes it difficult to identify who are potential candidates for study/surveys for external researchers, and no central authority monitoring programs so little standardisation between them meaning some groups may be more effective than others (this is somewhat reflected in a comment above about trying other groups which may mean that the real effectiveness comes from the community it brings, not the program itself, but that's pure speculation on my part)
Interesting - I've been thinking of trying it out but was going to use a clinic like contral.com in Finland. Maybe I'll just see if I can find a local doc who will write me a script