New era has firm foundation for quality-driven progress

It is anticipated China will announce higher-than-expected GDP growth for 2017 on Thursday, but its strong economic performance, marked by its first growth acceleration in seven years, has been tainted by the recent admission by some local governments they have been doctoring their economic data.

Economic development has been an important criterion for evaluations of local officials and some of them in places such as the Inner Mongolia autonomous region and Tianjin municipality have resorted to falsifying the figures so they reflect better on their performance. Against that backdrop, it is understandable that doubts have been cast on the quality and accuracy of the world’s second-largest economy’s overall growth data.

However, given the improvement in China’s national statistical regime in recent years, the fabrication of some local data does not impair the accuracy of the national economic data.

China’s national statistics bureau does not rely solely on reports of provincial governments to compile its data for the whole economy. Rather, the bureau has put a direct-reporting system in place, through which the original data of local enterprises are reported, so that it can use the corporate data, together with other local indicators, such as power generation, railway freight and taxes, to crosscheck the accuracy of data provided by the provincial governments.

Such a methodology ensures the credibility of the national data. Those questioning it would do better to shift their focus to what it indicates: the faster rate of growth of the world’s second-largest economy and its improved quality of growth.

Premier Li Keqiang hinted last week that the country’s GDP growth for 2017 would be “around 6.9 percent”, marking the first acceleration in growth in seven years from a 26-year low of 6.7 percent in 2016. To put this in perspective, China’s growth in 2017 was roughly equal to the economic scale of Australia in terms of quantity.

More significantly, there have been signs of further improvement in the country’s economic structure, such as the growing contribution of consumption, the emerging influence of high-tech sectors, the narrowing gap between rural and urban areas, and the successful reduction of excessive production capacities, all of which point to solid progress in pursuing high-quality development.

President Xi Jinping said at the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in October that China will seek quality-driven development in the new era. The country’s sound economic growth in 2017 has laid the groundwork for achieving that goal in 2018 and the years ahead.