China GDP grows 10.2 percent - Fantastic

China's gross domestic product grew by 10.2 percent in the first quarter of this year on the back of fast-paced trade growth, Chinese President Hu Jintao said in a televised speech.
"The mainland economy maintained good developmental momentum with our GDP in the first quarter rising by 10.2 percent and import and export trade up by 25 percent," Hu said in a meeting with Taiwan's former Kuomintang opposition leader Lien Chan.
"Frankly speaking, we do not hope to pursue extreme high speed (growth), we are paying more attention to the efficiency and quality of development," Hu said.

"We are paying more attention to the transformation of the mode of growth, resource conservation, environmental protection and more importantly the improvement of the lives of the people."

The robust first quarter GDP figure comes ahead of Hu's visit to the United States this week where a growing US trade deficit that hit 202 billion dollars last year is likely to be at the top of the talks agenda.

Washington has also become increasingly impatient with Beijing for allegedly seeking to boost exports by keeping the yuan at artificially low levels, and for failing to adequately open its markets and protect intellectual property rights.

On Tuesday, the commerce ministry announced that China's trade surplus had surged 98.5 percent in March from a year earlier to 11.19 billion dollars.

The trade surplus for the first three months of the year was up 41.4 percent from the same period in 2005 to 23.31 billion dollars, it said.

This came on the back of booming foreign trade in March with exports rising 28.3 percent year-on-year to 78.05 billion dollars and imports growing by 21 percent to 66.86 billion dollars.

First quarter exports grew by 26.6 percent to 197.3 billion dollars, while imports were up 24.8 percent year-on-year to 174 billion dollars, the ministry said.

China has not yet released the full range of first quarter economic statistics including the latest numbers on booming fixed asset investment and growing consumer spending.

"The 10.2 percent GDP growth in the first quarter is realistic because we saw that electricity consumption grew by 11 percent in the first quarter," Andy Xie, Hong Kong-based chief economist for Asia Pacific for Morgan Stanley, said.

"China's GDP growth in previous years has been understated substantially so this is a reflection of what is going on," he said. "China's economy is growing fast and there will be a lot of demand from China."

In December, China overtook Italy as the world's sixth biggest economy when Beijing said it had massively underestimated the size of its own economy, mainly due to miscalculations in the services sector.

The government found that the economy at the end of 2004 was worth 16.8 percent or 284 billion dollars more than previously assessed.

By January, China's economy had become the world's fourth biggest, overtaking France and Britain, after the government announced economic growth of 9.9 percent in 2005.

The 2005 growth rate followed the revised growth rates of 10.1 percent in 2004 and 10 percent in 2003 that came with the new economic reassessment.

In his annual work report to parliament last month, Premier Wen Jiabao said the economy would grow by around 8.0 percent for the year, a forecast widely seen as overly cautious.
China's gross domestic product grew by 10.2 percent in the first quarter of this year on the back of fast-paced trade growth, Chinese President Hu Jintao said in a televised speech.