It seemed to sum up China's triumphant economic emergence perfectly. On December 20, Beijing announced that according to a new and more detailed assessment of the economy, China's gross domestic product for last year was actually 2.3 trillion yuan, or 17 per cent greater than was previously thought.
To put it another way, the revision is equivalent to Beijing's statisticians suddenly stumbling across a hitherto undiscovered province somewhere in China's interior with an economy about the size of Taiwan's.
At the revised level, China overhauled Italy to rank as the world's sixth-largest economy last year. With growth in excess of 9 per cent forecast for this year, pundits predict confidently that by now, the mainland will have already overtaken France and Britain to take fourth place in the global economic league.
This represents an impressive performance by anyone's standards. But more importantly, the revision makes China's development look a lot more balanced. It is as if the economy of the newly discovered province consisted almost entirely of service industries, rather than the construction and manufacturing for export that until now have been thought so critical to China's growth.
Factoring in the new figures, services now account for 41 per cent of economic output, rather than the anomalously low 32 per cent previously indicated. At the same time, the share of construction and industry drops to 46 per cent from 53 per cent.
The reassessment goes some way towards soothing fears that China is busy inflating a bubble economy. A bigger service sector means more domestic spending, and a smaller share in the economy for capital-intensive manufacturing industries means overall output is less reliant on investment.
