Buoyed by record foreign trade, surging fixed investments and industrial production, China's GDP soared by an impressive 10.7 per cent in 2006.

China's gross domestic product amounted to 20.9407 trillion yuan ($2.7 trillion) in 2006, up 10.7 per cent year on year, the National Bureau of Statistics said.

The growth was 0.3 percentage point higher than that in 2005, Commissioner of NBS, Xie Fuzhan said in Beijing, adding that prospects for a 'stable and fast' economic growth in 2007 was good.

China this week had revised its GDP growth in 2005 to the final figure of 10.4 per cent, higher than the original 9.9 per cent.

China's GDP growth was 10.4 per cent, 11.5 per cent, 10.6 per cent and 10.4 per cent from the first to fourth quarter of 2006, Xie said, commenting that there was no 'big drops' in GDP figures last year due to the timely macro-economic measures adopted by the government to rein-in over-heating in some sectors of the economy.

"The Chinese government took a series of timely macro-control policies last year, effectively preventing the economy from going fast into overheated," Xie said, adding the Chinese central bank has also adopted measures to control excessive liquidity.

China's primary, secondary and tertiary sectors posted a respective 2.47 trillion, 10.2004 trillion and 8.27 trillion yuan in added value, with the secondary sector, including industry, manufacturing and mining, growing at the fastest pace -- 12.5 per cent -- last year.

China's foreign trade last year set a new record at $1.76 trillion, up 23.8 per cent, which was 0.6 percentage point higher than 2005. Of this total, the value of exports was $969.1 billion, up 27.2 per cent while the value of imports was $791.6 billion, up 20 per cent over the previous year. China enjoyed a record trade surplus of $177.5 billion in 2006.

The country also received $63 billion in foreign direct investment last year, up 4.5 per cent. China's foreign exchange reserves also crossed the $1 trillion-mark for the first time in 2006. By the end of 2006, the forex reserves had touched $1.06 trillion, an increase of $247.3 billion since the beginning of the year.

The country's industrial production scenario was also good with improved economic returns, he said. The value-added output of all industrial enterprises in China grew 12.5 per cent year-on-year in 2006.

Major enterprises, each with an annual sales volume of $641,025 billion posted a growth of 16.6 per cent in value-added industrial output from the year-earlier level.

China's consumer price index (CPI), a major inflation index, grew by 1.5 per cent in 2006.

Housing prices in the country's 70 medium-sized and large cities went up by 5.5 per cent in 2006 over the previous year and the increase rate was 2.1 percentage points lower than that for 2005.

China's fixed asset investment totalled 10.987 trillion yuan in 2006, up 24 per cent year on year, or 2 percentage points lower than the same period a year earlier.