A new Chinese practice: blowing its own trumpet

CHINA is opening 2018 by doing something that it never used to do: boasting about its achievements and comparing itself favourably with the United States, backed up by a recent Gallup poll that showed more people in the world approved of Chinese than American leadership in the age of US President Donald Trump.

While the US economy grew a respectable 2.5 per cent in 2017, an improvement over the 2.1 per cent of 2016, it was way outdistanced by Chinese economic growth of 6.9 per cent.

Still, China is only the world's second-largest economy. In actual numbers, the size of the Chinese economy exceeded US$12.5 trillion by the end of 2017, smaller than the US GDP of roughly US$19.5 trillion.