Whether any government's statistics can be fully trusted to tell a story other than the one it wants you to hear, the clear truth of China's gross domestic product data is that focusing on its percentage point change is guaranteed to mislead. That is because the scale of economic growth in the past decade has been phenomenal. The mainland economy is now 300 per cent bigger than it was a decade ago, which is why growth of 7.4 per cent last year is in fact better than the 10.1 per cent chalked up in 2004. "The incremental increase in the size of China's GDP last year was 100 per cent bigger than the increase at the faster speed 10 years ago," says Andy Rothman, a China watcher and investment strategist at money manager Matthews Asia.
