The first question regarding China's newly released economic numbers is not how fast the People's Republic of China (PRC) grew last year. Rather, it is whether stars are aligned for the State Statistical Bureau (SSB) to provide accurate information about GDP and more useful measures, such as household consumption.

Answer: to some extent. The Chinese economy is undergoing a cyclical recovery and the SSB can honestly report a noticeable improvement.

There are two large qualifiers to this happy statement. First, the SSB never provides much valuable information due to political imperatives and flaws in GDP accounting itself. Second, the recovery is cyclical, not structural. The PRC's economy structurally weakened under Hu Jintao's outgoing government and, until market reform restarts, slow weakening will continue. Chinese data do not reflect this weakness and, therefore, incentives at work in Beijing. The U.S. needs its own measurements of China's economy as the first step toward better policymaking.