China Urged to Revise GDP Growth Claims
As China's government struggles to keep its economic growth rates from falling further, it faces persistent questions about its growth claims in the past. China economists and scholars have argued for years over the accuracy of official gross domestic product figures. In 2007, Premier Li Keqiang described the data as "man-made" and "for reference only," when he served as a provincial leader of the Communist Party of China (CPC), according to a memo published by WikiLeaks in 2010.
Criticisms of the figures issued by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) have focused on the remarkable stability of GDP growth rates through good times and bad. No matter what the external pressures, the NBS figures have had an uncanny knack not only for meeting the government's GDP targets but also for varying from quarter to quarter by no more than 0.1-0.2 percentage points, critics say.
