Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is, of course, completely different from the performance figures of departments in large corporations, because... um.
The parent never implies that it is. However, at the end of the day large corporations need to keep shareholders pleased to survive. They could lie all they want to themselves, but the shareholders would see through that and remove the bad administrators. China has no such mechanism to ensure accountability.
Some years ago, I got an investment club to put some of our money in Harley-Davidson, based on numbers that hit our criteria perfectly. Too perfectly. A few months later, the CEO resigned, revised numbers came out, it became clear they'd been more or less cooking the books, and the stock tanked. This happens a lot. Worse, it happens with stock market darlings. Remember Enron?