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!

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.

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.