Bloomberg News reported that Yao Jingyuan, the chief economist of the National Bureau of Statistics, speaking at the same press conference as Li, told reporters that there was "no chance of the yuan being revalued this year."
The comment did not appear in the official transcript of the press conference, however, and a spokeswoman for the bureau declined to confirm or deny it. In China, the central bank and the finance ministry determine currency policy.
Zheng, of JP Morgan Chase, said that China's strong growth in the fourth quarter would make the year-over-year comparisons of economic growth look good at least through the first three quarters of this year.
She predicted that the Chinese economy would expand at an annual rate of 9 percent for the year, and that inflation would peak at 5 percent by June, with price increases concentrated in food, energy and raw materials.
Many independent economists suspect that China smoothes its statistics, adjusting high numbers down and low numbers up, so as to show fewer booms and busts and fewer spikes in inflation, although Li denied this last autumn. For instance, Western economists put the Chinese economy's expansion at 11 to 13 percent in the fourth quarter, not the 9.9 percent the government claimed.
China releases only year-to-year comparative quarterly growth figures, and avoids specifying growth rates from quarter to quarter. The National Bureau of Statistics said on Tuesday that the Chinese economy had been 6.7 percent larger in the second quarter of last year than in the second quarter of 2002, but Zheng estimated from the official figures that the Chinese economy actually shrank 4.9 percent in the second quarter compared with the preceding quarter, mainly because of an outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS.
Chinese inflation figures are even harder to understand, partly because China has not recently updated the weightings of products that a typical household buys.
The December figures released on Tuesday were expected a week ago, a delay that was not explained.
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