A massive stimulus package implemented with lightning speed soon after the global financial crisis began has been key in bolstering the world's third-largest economy.

But the question now is whether other important growth drivers, especially private consumer spending, will follow.

"Over the full year, the government's eight-percent growth target looks extremely easy to achieve," said Glenn Maguire, a Hong Kong-based economist for Societe Generale.

"China can undoubtedly mobilise resources much more quickly and efficiently than western economies. It's just a function of still being a centrally planned command economy."

The National Bureau of Statistics this week issued its much-anticipated data for the first quarter, including 6.1 percent overall economic growth, which several analysts said was the lowest in nearly two decades.

However, the headline figure covered a much more complex underlying reality where a four-trillion-yuan (580-billion-dollar) fiscal programme unveiled in November has unleashed economic forces of enormous power.

For example investment in fixed assets in the cities, a key measure of how the trillions were being spent, rose by 30.3 percent in March from a year earlier, the statistics bureau said.

But if looking at the same figure in real terms, discounting a drop in producer prices, fixed asset investment growth was actually 36.3 percent, the highest level since 1998, according to research by HSBC.

"China's economy has bounced back from the horror of the fourth quarter of 2008," said Standard Chartered economist Stephen Green in a research note.

"It seems clear that commercial bank-financed, government-sponsored infrastructure projects are the main driver behind this recovery."

But why then did the stock markets not react more enthusiastically, ending just 0.08 percent lower after the release of the data Thursday? Perhaps because many of the questions about the economy remain unanswered.

"It seems that there is a time lag between the Chinese economic cycle and that of the mainstream world economy," said Yang Chen, an expert on the Chinese economy at the University of Bristol in Britain.

"The Chinese economy has only gone through a downturn so far, and perhaps the real crisis has not landed in China yet," she said.

External factors remain extremely uncertain, with China's traditional export markets in North America and Europe in recession.

This is a huge risk for a country where exports account for more than a third of the overall economy, compared with less than a fifth during the Asian financial crisis a decade ago.

Already more than 20 million people working mostly in export-related factories have lost their jobs, and the government on Thursday identified unemployment as one area of concern for the rest of the year.

Amid the export woes, China has to rely more on domestic growth sources, including consumer spending.

"If consumption can be further boosted into a major growth engine, China will eventually step out of the global crisis with a much more sustainable growth model," the state-run China Daily said Friday.

That is, however, a big if. Chinese consumer spending currently accounts for just 35 percent of the nation's gross domestic product, compared with about 70 percent for the United States.

The challenge is to find ways to encourage people to spend more, which is hard because a crumbling social safety system is forcing families to put money in the bank for a rainy day.

"Chinese consumers are buffered by high savings rates. Unlocking those savings rates is the focal point of policy," research firm Global Insight said in a report.

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