Is growth in China soaring or slowing?

THE EXCITED headlines were predictable. When China reported its GDP for the first three months of the year on April 16th, growth soared to 18.3% compared with a year earlier. It was China’s fastest growth on record, underlining the strength of its recovery. Yet it also illustrates the oddities in how GDP is reported.China’s recovery should be old news. Since last March, when the country emerged from its covid-19 closures, a wide range of indicators, from metro ridership to export orders, have pointed upwards. But because the convention in China is to report GDP in year-on-year terms, it is only now that the recovery makes a dramatic appearance in its most-watched data series. The nearly normal first quarter of 2021 is being compared with the largely locked-down first quarter of 2020. (If anything, the latest number was slightly below economists’ expectations.)