But on Monday, 361 days after those initial lockdowns, the central ­government announced that the turnaround was complete. The national economy is now growing more quickly than it was before the pandemic.

At a press conference on Monday, Chinese officials were triumphant. Ning Jizhe, head of the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), said the economic recovery “will go down in history”.

“These achievements have been achieved while the pan­demic is raging around the world, the world economy is in a severe ­recession, and the external ­environment [for China] is more complicated and severe. They were hard won,” Ning said.

Economists expect China’s GDP will expand by 8.2 per cent this year, continuing to outpace global peers even as they begin to recover due to a roll-out of ­vaccines.

Monday’s data release for 2020 came loaded with ­symbolism that has already been seized upon in government press ­releases and state media.

It was the first year in which China’s ­economic size expanded beyond the 100 ­trillion yuan (US$15.43 trillion) mark. China also produced 1 ­billion tonnes of steel for the first time last year.

But over the same period, in less-remarked-upon numbers, debt levels soared.

The recovery model has attracted criticism from some observers of the Chinese economy, who pointed to retail sales falling by 3.9 per cent, even as industrial production rose by 2.8 per cent.

Michael Pettis, a finance professor at Peking University, said that in turning to its old playbook of growth, China had prioritised a “worsening of the healthy parts of its economy by unleashing enough of the unhealthy, non-productive growth it has long tried to constrain”, namely real ­estate and infrastructure.

“It performed badly, like the rest of the world, and it is only ­because Beijing sharply increased all the things it has been trying to rein in that the GDP measure was able to rise,” Pettis tweeted. “To say that China was the only major economy to grow in 2020, in other words, is only to say that we are unable to distinguish between GDP and the economy.”

Others point to the political expediency of the numbers, which were inflated by regular, timely downward revisions of ­historical data, meaning 2020’s figures were growing from a lower base level.

“The frequency and scale of these quiet changes, without a clear explanation by NBS, means that we’re struggling with a much more opaque picture of the economy,” said Nick Marro, ­global trade lead at the Economist Intelligence Unit. “This isn’t to suggest growth isn’t happening – it definitely is – but that the optics of strong growth are still ­incredibly important to China’s leaders.”

Trey McArver, a partner at ­economic consultancy Trivium China, added that the “comparatively strong economic performance in 2020” meant that “Chinese authorities understood that controlling the virus was a precondition to getting the economy back up and running. China’s relatively strong growth in 2020 is because authorities made it their top priority to control the virus”.

At a seminar in Beijing in December, Arthur Kroeber, founding partner of Gavekal Dragonomics, a China-focused economic research consultancy, recalled China’s initially botched handling of the virus.

“I think there are plenty of people, maybe not speaking super openly, who remain quite critical of the initial response in Wuhan in January, and I think there are a lot of unanswered questions about that,” Kroeber said.

“But fundamentally, the basic impression that I get is that people here are quite justifiably proud of the way that the system has responded and enabled life to get … closer to normal than anywhere else in the world.

“So, in terms of if it was a win for the Chinese system, I think basically yes – it was a win for the Chinese system.”

Additional reporting by Bloomberg