China's current account surplus was about 5.1 percent of gross domestic product last year, down from 2009 but still exceeding the 4 percent threshold that US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner thought was needed to keep the global economy well balanced. China notched up a $306.2 billion current account surplus last year, the foreign exchange regulator said on Monday, up 3 percent from its surplus in 2009.
Because the economy grew far faster than that - at 10.3 percent last year - the current account surplus did in fact shrink as a percentage of GDP. China chalked up a current account surplus of 6.0 percent of GDP in 2009, down from a peak of 10.6 percent in 2007.
Beijing has vowed to seek balance in its flow of international payments, but the country has reported "twin surpluses" in both its current and capital accounts every year since 1994.
Yi Gang, a deputy governor of the People's Bank of China, has expressed confidence that the current account surplus is on track to shrink to four percent of GDP - a benchmark suggested by Geithner to indicate whether an economy is out of balance. Geithner's proposal was scuppered when other G20 members declined to set any hard limits.
But International Monetary Fund staff economists have said they see potential for significant surpluses to reappear over the medium term, albeit not on the scale of 2007.
The State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE) said in Monday's statement that China's current account surplus in 2010 rose 25 percent from 2009, but according to the official current account surplus of $297.1 billion for 2009, the increase was only 3.1 percent.
Phone calls to SAFE to explain the discrepancy were not answered. China's foreign exchange reserves rose by $185 billion in the fourth quarter of 2010, SAFE said, smaller than the $199 billion surge initially reported by the central bank.