Has China already crashed?

Owing to unreliable official data, China's economic growth may be even worse than thought.

Is China's economy already having a hard landing? Chinese statistics are widely deemed unreliable, and some long-time China watchers have suggested that it could be in bigger trouble than we thought, notes Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in The Daily Telegraph.

Chinese economists have constructed an index based on electricity consumption figures, rail freight movements and credit growth, because a Wikileaks cable quotes Premier Li Keqiang saying he looked at those three factors to assess how the economy was really doing. This index suggests that annual growth has slumped to under 2%. That's below the trough seen at the height of the global crisis in 2009. The official figure is currently 7.5%.

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