New era has firm foundation for quality-driven progress

It is anticipated China will announce higher-than-expected GDP growth for 2017 on Thursday, but its strong economic performance, marked by its first growth acceleration in seven years, has been tainted by the recent admission by some local governments they have been doctoring their economic data.

Economic development has been an important criterion for evaluations of local officials and some of them in places such as the Inner Mongolia autonomous region and Tianjin municipality have resorted to falsifying the figures so they reflect better on their performance. Against that backdrop, it is understandable that doubts have been cast on the quality and accuracy of the world's second-largest economy's overall growth data.

However, given the improvement in China's national statistical regime in recent years, the fabrication of some local data does not impair the accuracy of the national economic data.