Even though it has a population of 1.36bn people and the world’s second-largest economy, China somehow manages to collect, collate and publish its quarterly gross domestic product figures in the space of just two weeks each quarter, then never revises them.
The independently governed Chinese territory of Hong Kong, with a population of just 7m people, takes six weeks to publish its figures while the US takes eight weeks and provides continuous revisions after the initial number comes out.
Then there is the strange and statistically impossible phenomenon of every single province in China posting annual growth rates that are higher than the national average.