By Zhou Xin and Farah Master
BEIJING, Feb 10 (Reuters) - Chinese imports rocketed and exports rose strongly in January from a year earlier, when a slump in trade due to the global financial crisis was magnified by the timing of the country's Lunar New Year holiday.
The recovery in exports, if sustained, could intensify pressure on Beijing to let the yuan appreciate, having kept it on ice since mid-July 2008, a policy that helped China to supplant Germany last year as the world's biggest goods' exporter.
But calendar differences make interpretation of the data fraught: China effectively worked one extra week this January than it did last year. And policymakers will likely find enough in the numbers to justify keeping the yuan stable for at least a couple more months.
Imports surged 85.5 percent year on the year and exports climbed 21.0, both broadly in line with expectations, resulting in a $14.2 billion surplus.
In month-on-month terms, however, imports and exports tumbled 15.1 percent and 16.3 percent, respectively.
'The strong figures are mainly due to the low base of comparison from a year earlier,' said Xu Jian, an economist at China International Capital Corp in Beijing.
'A single month's good export performance will definitely not increase the chances for the government to start resuming yuan appreciation, which I don't expect will happen until the second half,' he said.
Weakening import momentum could also reinforce investors' worries that China's clampdown on bank lending is weighing on domestic growth, and by extension depriving the global economy of its strongest engine since the financial crisis struck in late 2008.
Data from around Asia has already made that impression, with South Korean average daily exports in January falling at the fastest monthly pace in a year.
The Australian dollar briefly dipped as traders paid attention to the month-on-month declines in exports and imports.
'Imports purely for domestic consumption or production will probably be slower, so (in the coming months) the increase in export growth will be bigger than the increase in import growth,' Jun Ma, chief China economist with Deutsche Bank in Hong Kong, said.
AMMUNITION
A recovery in global demand after last year's collapse could drive China's year-on-year export growth to 40 percent before long, said Ben Simpfendorfer, an economist at Royal Bank of Scotland in Hong Kong.
'That will provide critics of China's yuan policy with ammunition,' he said.
U.S. President Barack Obama said last week that Washington would take a tougher stance on trade and currency issues with Beijing, fanning speculation that his administration could soon formally declare China to be manipulating its currency.
China has rebuffed such calls over the past few months, with the latest broadside published in a front-page editorial in the official China Securities Journal on Wednesday.
Conditions are not right for China to allow any major yuan appreciation in the first half of the year, and it will not give in to foreign demands to let its currency rise, it said.
Beijing has in effect re-pegged the yuan around 6.83 per dollar since mid-2008 to help its exporters and shore up financial stability.
Even as China became the world's export champion last year, its trade surplus dropped 34 percent to $196.1 billion as stimulus spending led imports to decline at a slower rate than exports.
(Additional reporting by Aileen Wang and Michael Wei; Writing by Simon Rabinovitch; Editing by Ken Wills)
((simon.rabinovitch@thomsonreuters.com; +86 139 0111 6692; Reuters Messaging: simon.rabinovitch.reuters.com@reuters.net)) Keywords: CHINA ECONOMY/TRADE
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