On Thursday, the National Bureau of Statistics spokesman Li Xiaochao had been comfortably batting away curly questions from the international media about what lay beneath China's spectacular headline GDP growth of 8.9 per cent through the year.

But one question from Shanghai's Oriental Post tied him hopelessly in knots: "What is the amount and growth rate of consumption expenditure for government administration, compared with last year?"

The journalist was asking how much of China's spectacular retail sales growth - 17 per cent after adjusting for falls in prices - was simply the bureaucracy taking advantage of the fiscal stimulus to spend more money on itself. The question cut to the core of whether China's rivers of cash have flowed to the people or been invested by an ever-growing state.

In the 1980s the Bureau of Statistics did provide a breakdown of institutional and private consumption in its national accounts. But it doesn't any more. The NBS spokesman said he didn't understand the question and referred the journalist to the Ministry of Finance. His non-answer invites independent economists to fill the void.

Huang Yasheng, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of a seminal book published last year on China's economic model called Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics, estimates that government and corporate consumption may have jumped from 10 per cent of retail sales in the '80s to between 25 and 30 per cent since the mid '90s. The share of household consumption has fallen accordingly.