At least Colby agrees with me . . .

Colby Cosh finally admits to feeling similar concerns about the widespread belief in official Chinese economic figures:

Are the spectacular Chinese economic growth numbers of the post-Deng era reliable? The West has been tricked into bad policy decisions before because economists foolishly trusted Communist growth estimates. The George Mason economist Bryan Caplan has just voiced what I've been thinking since the early 1990s (which is admittedly a long time to wait for data to be falsified)

[. . .]

The two-headed creature so often talked of as "Chinanindia" (I think at this point we can just start calling it "Chindia") has taken over from Japan in our imaginations as the next "obvious" successor to the economy supremacy of the West. Japan turned out to be the wrong horse to bet on, and still hasn't fixed all of its macroeconomic issues. And it is often forgotten that even by official numbers China's economy is still much smaller than the U.S.'s and is dwarfed by the combined size of NAFTA and the EU.

Of course, I've been riding this hobby horse occasionally since 2004.