“China on Tuesday reported its economy grew 6.7% during the third quarter. Nothing suspicious about that”
It’s not necessarily that they are cheating. Their whole public statistic system is a crap. One needs to take a look at car sales or container port traffic (which are “hard” data, not estimates of any kind) to see what’s really going on there. Chinese themselves don’t know what the size of their economy is. They are not cheating, they are guessing.
That's my take too, that they're guessing and they pretty much know it. I get a bit tired of U.S. pundits that strut out what the "true" China GDP is. Like they know the 'truth' and we don't.