The news last Friday that China's economy slowed to its lowest growth rate in three years caused anxiety around the world.
With much of Europe in recession, and the United States struggling to escape its own downturn, a whole legion of commentators promptly warned that the only remaining engine of global growth is now in danger of stalling.
At first glance, it looks as if people were right to be worried. China's gross domestic product in the second quarter of the year was up by just 7.6 per cent compared with the same three-month period last year.
As the first chart shows, barring the short-lived slowdown in the depths of the financial crisis, that's China's lowest rate of growth in the last 10 years.
What's more, the pessimists were able to point to a range of supplementary data indicating the slowdown may be worse than the official figures imply.
As a result, some analysts concluded that China's true growth rate in the second quarter was below 7 per cent and that the economy is irreversibly crunching down to a painfully hard landing.