ICBC counts this by deposits. It claims that clients invested another 950 billion yuan, or $140 billion, in the first three months of this year, boosting total deposits to 9.78 trillion yuan, or $1.43 trillion. This took it to pole position of JPMorgan Chase and Japan's Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group.

It's a headline-catching claim, but it does not mean that much unless one can get behind the veil that shrouds so many Chinese financial statistics and examine the number of ICBC's non-performing loans. But it certainly fits with some other data, including a record month for car purchases in China and a record month for oil imports. The overall trend of the data suggests that China is battling its way out of the global recession faster than almost anyone else.

If this is true and China's economy takes over from the United States as the locomotive that can haul the rest of the world out of trouble, the implications will be profound. First, it would mean that the global pecking order has fundamentally shifted. China's economy may be less than a quarter of the size of the American economy by gross domestic product, but it is already big enough to have a world-moving effect.

And with investors around the world hungry to make up their losses, clear signs of a Chinese recovery would be likely to attract more foreign investment to China, fueling more growth and reinforcing the success of the Beijing government in successfully managing the economic crisis. This would strengthen China's growing diplomatic and political influence on the world stage.

Second, this would bolster China's claim that its economic model of state-controlled capitalism and planned growth is the most assured route to success for developing countries. This carries a double implication. It would suggest that the U.S.-led model of free trade and barely restrained free market capitalism got the world into its economic mess, but it would also carry the message that China's authoritarian political model, with curbs on free speech and free press and limited human rights, is the path to prosperity.

Chinese officials explain this rather differently, suggesting that a state-controlled economy can move faster and more decisively in times of crisis. Zhou Xiaochuan, head of the People's Bank of China, the central bank, was quoted last week in the Beijing press as saying, "In modern Western societies, a prolonged political process for mandates to finance ministries or central banks often miss the best timing for action."

Third, it would mean that China's massive $586 billion stimulus package, announced last October, is already starting to work. This is probably good news for the United States and for the rest of the world since their own stimulus packages will start to take effect soon. It's clear that China's new spending on infrastructure has been important in reviving demand for oil, copper and other raw materials, putting a floor under what looked a few weeks ago to be a broad collapse of commodity prices.

Finally, since U.S. and European imports of Chinese goods have been hit hard by the recession, it would also mean that China's recovery is to a striking degree being fueled by domestic consumption rather than by exports. That is important because while exports can help an economy take off, for sustained growth that benefits the people, consumption-fueled growth of the kind enjoyed by the United States and Europe over the past 60 years is the better bet for the long term.

But there may be a few flaws in Beijing's claims. The first came from a rather worried Professor Cao Jianhai of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a senior government adviser who fears that China is in its own housing bubble. Prices are likely to fall by half over the next two years, even while average housing prices are now more than 10 times the average income so that an average 60 percent of a buyer's income goes to a mortgage.

Then Singapore stunned Asian markets this week by revising its forecast for the year downward, reckoning a year-on-year GDP decline of 11.5 percent in the first quarter of 2009. This year, which in January had been expected to see an overall decline of 2 to 5 percent, is now expected to see a decline of between 6 and 9 percent -- despite a big stimulus package that is expected to boost construction by 25 percent. This is not just bad for Singapore but for Southeast Asian and wider Asian economies as a whole, for whom the Singapore entrepot is a bellwether.

The final flaw for Beijing remains the massive size of the environmental challenge it faces -- shrinking arable land and a water crisis, drought slashing its winter wheat crop by almost half and the demographic consequences of 30 years of the one-child policy. In not much more than a decade, China's working-age population starts to shrink as its growing number of elderly makes it the world's second-fastest aging society after Japan. Whether or not China's latest claims to lead the world out of recession are believed, the country is still condemned to grow old before it gets rich.

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