The Chinese economy is now worth $17.6 trillion, slightly higher than the $17.4 trillion the International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates for the US.
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Sign in China reading 'Development Prosperity'
But with a population of 1.36 billion people, China really should be the world's largest economy, argues Matthew Crabbe, author of Myth-Busting China's Numbers. He's spent more than 20 years looking at the country's figures and the facts behind them.
His reaction to China's new title: "So what?"
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He points out that if you look at per capita spending power - the value of all goods and services produced within a nation in a given year divided by the average population for the same year - then, even adjusted for PPP, China ($11,868) is still lagging a long way behind not only the United States ($53,001) but also the likes of Turkmenistan ($12,863) and Suriname ($16,080).
So how easy is it to accurately measure the size of the Chinese economy or even just parts of it?
Not very, says Crabbe. "One of the key things that has to be understood is that distortions that happen at the village and provincial levels become amplified as they go out the statistical gathering chain.
"Year on year the GDP figures for each province grew faster than the national total, which logically and mathematically could not be."