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The spectacular slowdown in officially reported Chinese economic growth has received a lot of attention. However, given the widely reported unreliability of China's official macroeconomic data, no reliable chronology of either business cycles or growth phases in China is available. We fill this gap in three steps. First, we reconstruct a quarterly industrial value added series, over four decades (1980-2019), using disaggregated commodities data. Official data overreported growth in all decades except the 2000s. Second, with a non-parametric approach, we establish a reference dating of recession and rapid growth phases. Recessions were present every ten years up to the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), and three times in the last decade. Rapid growth only started with WTO entry and ended with the GFC. Third, we exploit the commodities data used in our reconstruction to detect which industrial sectors are leading and lagging during recession and rapid growth phases. The diffusion of recessions across sectors which had fallen for two decades went up in the last decade.
