China’s GDP: in danger of overheating

飞雪寒冰

You don’t need to study Wikileaks US embassy cables on “man-made” Chinese gross domestic product numbers to appreciate that Beijing can be prone to the occasional rounding error. That suspicion tends to be strongest in the run-up to new year, when the nation shuts down for a week’s vacation. Thursday’s data package evoked the Holy Grail for policymakers everywhere: a slight fall in consumer price inflation, combined with strong – but not too strong – growth. Relax! Enjoy yourselves!


你不需要到维基解密(Wikileaks)网站上寻找有关“人造”中国国内生产总值(GDP)的美国使馆电文，也能想见北京方面可能偶尔会在四舍五入方面出错。这种疑心往往在春节之前最为强烈，春节时中国全国将放假一周。无论对什么地方的政策制定者来说，中国周四公布的一批数据都可谓是“圣杯”：消费价格指数(CPI)略有下降，加上强劲（但又不是过于强劲）的增长。放松吧！好好享受一段太平日子吧！

飞雪寒冰

Hardly. Inflation’s retreat, from a 5.1 per cent rate in November to 4.6 per cent in December, is likely to be brief. On a month-to-month basis, consumer price inflation is still rising, by 0.4 per cent, while producer prices for both raw materials and manufactured goods rose even faster, at 1.5 per cent. Food prices, up almost 10 per cent in the last year, are a particular point of pressure for consumers. Citigroup’s index of vulnerability to food price inflation – blending the weight of food in the CPI basket with measures of industrial capacity utilisation and monetary looseness – puts China above all other emerging markets.



但人们很难放心。通胀率从11月的5.1%降至12月的4.6%，这种回落很可能是短暂的。按月度环比计算，消费价格指数仍在上升，升幅为0.4%，而原材料和工业品出厂价上升更快，升幅达到1.5%。食品价格在过去一年上涨近10%，尤其给中国消费者带来了压力。根据花旗集团(Citigroup)编制的食品价格通胀脆弱性指数（结合CPI篮子中食品的权重与工业产能利用率和货币政策宽松程度），中国的脆弱性高于其它所有新兴市场经济体。

飞雪寒冰

On growth, too, while the headline number suggests only a mild acceleration, from 9.6 to 9.8 per cent from the third to the fourth quarter, that is probably not the whole story. In the leaked 2007 cable, Li Keqiang – then a provincial party head, now premier-in-waiting – confided that he preferred to look at three harder-to-manipulate metrics: electricity consumption, rail cargo volume and bank lending. The first two are at full throttle: electricity consumption rose almost 15 per cent last year, 8 percentage points more than in 2009, while freight traffic’s 10 per cent growth over the first 11 months was about double the five-year average. New loans of Rmb480bn last month, meanwhile, were 10 times their level of December 2007. And this is an economy that is supposed to be slowing. The upcoming year of the rabbit could be hairy indeed.



增长方面也有问题。尽管整体数字显示增长仅出现温和加速，从第三季度的9.6%增至第四季度的9.8%，但这很可能并未全面反映实情。在维基解密泄露的一份2007年美国外交电文中，时任省委书记、现为下一届中国总理人选的李克强坦承：他宁愿关注三个更难操纵的数据：用电量、铁路货运量和银行放贷金额。目前中国的前两个数据正迅猛上升：去年用电量上升近15%，比2009年高出8个百分点，而货运量在前11个月增长10%，大约为五年平均增幅的两倍。与此同时，上月新增贷款4800亿元人民币，达到2007年12月水平的10倍，而中国经济本来应该是减速的。即将到来的兔年可能的确会令人毛骨耸然。