You don’t need to study Wikileaks US embassy cables on “man-made” Chinese gross domestic product numbers to appreciate that Beijing can be prone to the occasional rounding error. That suspicion tends to be strongest in the run-up to new year, when the nation shuts down for a week’s vacation. Thursday’s data package evoked the Holy Grail for policymakers everywhere: a slight fall in consumer price inflation, combined with strong – but not too strong – growth. Relax! Enjoy yourselves!

　　你不需要到維基解密(Wikileaks)網站上尋找有關“人造”中國國內生產總值(GDP)的美國使館電文，也能想見北京方面可能偶爾會在四舍五入方面出錯。這種疑心往往在春節之前最為強烈，春節時中國全國將放假一周。無論對什么地方的政策制定者來說，中國周四公布的一批數據都可謂是“圣杯”：消費價格指數(CPI)略有下降，加上強勁（但又不是過于強勁）的增長。放松吧！好好享受一段太平日子吧！

　　Hardly. Inflation’s retreat, from a 5.1 per cent rate in November to 4.6 per cent in December, is likely to be brief. On a month-to-month basis, consumer price inflation is still rising, by 0.4 per cent, while producer prices for both raw materials and manufactured goods rose even faster, at 1.5 per cent. Food prices, up almost 10 per cent in the last year, are a particular point of pressure for consumers. Citigroup’s index of vulnerability to food price inflation – blending the weight of food in the CPI basket with measures of industrial capacity utilisation and monetary looseness – puts China above all other emerging markets.

　　 但人們很難放心。通脹率從11月的5.1%降至12月的4.6%，這種回落很可能是短暫的。按月度環比計算，消費價格指數仍在上升，升幅為0.4%，而原材料和工業品出廠價上升更快，升幅達到1.5%。食品價格在過去一年上漲近10%，尤其給中國消費者帶來了壓力。根據花旗集團(Citigroup)編制的食品價格通脹脆弱性指數（結合CPI籃子中食品的權重與工業產能利用率和貨幣政策寬松程度），中國的脆弱性高于其它所有新興市場經濟體。

　　On growth, too, while the headline number suggests only a mild acceleration, from 9.6 to 9.8 per cent from the third to the fourth quarter, that is probably not the whole story. In the leaked 2007 cable, Li Keqiang – then a provincial party head, now premier-in-waiting – confided that he preferred to look at three harder-to-manipulate metrics: electricity consumption, rail cargo volume and bank lending. The first two are at full throttle: electricity consumption rose almost 15 per cent last year, 8 percentage points more than in 2009, while freight traffic’s 10 per cent growth over the first 11 months was about double the five-year average. New loans of Rmb480bn last month, meanwhile, were 10 times their level of December 2007. And this is an economy that is supposed to be slowing. The upcoming year of the rabbit could be hairy indeed.

　　增長方面也有問題。盡管整體數字顯示增長僅出現溫和加速，從第三季度的9.6%增至第四季度的9.8%，但這很可能并未全面反映實情。在維基解密泄露的一份2007年美國外交電文中，時任省委書記、現為下一屆中國總理人選的李克強坦承：他寧愿關注三個更難操縱的數據：用電量、鐵路貨運量和銀行放貸金額。目前中國的前兩個數據正迅猛上升：去年用電量上升近15%，比2009年高出8個百分點，而貨運量在前11個月增長10%，大約為五年平均增幅的兩倍。與此同時，上月新增貸款4800億元人民幣，達到2007年12月水平的10倍，而中國經濟本來應該是減速的。即將到來的兔年可能的確會令人毛骨聳然。