FT Alphaville remains quite bearish on China, indicating that China may be suffering from the leading edge of a significant financial crisis from excess renminbi liquidity. But more alarming is the increased sketchiness of China's official trade and GDP numbers. They cite, among a long list of other items, this troubling anecdote in a recent NYT article:

In a series of interviews over the last week, bankers and senior executives from provinces all over China, in a range of light and heavy industries, cited a broad deterioration in business conditions. Two of them said that some tax agencies in smaller cities had been telling companies to inflate their sales and profits to make local economic growth look less weak than it really was, while reassuring the companies that their actual tax bills would be left unchanged.