China's economy has shown signs of warning up, according to statistics for January-March released by the National Bureau of Statistics.

China's gross domestic product (GDP) reached 6.5745 trillion yuan (939 billion U.S. dollars) in the first quarter, up 6.1% year on year with the growth rate 4.5 percentage points less than a year earlier but only 0.7 percentage points less than the previous quarter, narrowing the gap of on-year decrease. Statistics show that China's retail sales of consumer goods

 increased 15% on year to 2.94 trillion yuan in the first quarter, its fixed asset investment went up 28.8% to 2.81 trillion yuan, and its industrial added value of scale enterprises rose 5.1% (A scale enterprise means an enterprise with an annual operating revenue over 5 million yuan). The per capita disposable income of urban residents rose 10.2% to 4,834 yuan for the first quarter (Deducting price factors, the increase reached 11.2%), while that of rural residents also climbed 8.6% to 1,622 yuan.

During the first quarter, foreign trade dropped 24.9% to 428.7 billion U.S. dollars. Exports were down 19.7% to 245.5 billion U.S. dollars. Imports slumped 30.9% to 183.2 billion U.S. dollars.

Actually used foreign direct investment stood at 21.8 billion U.S. dollars in the first quarter, down 5.6 billion U.S. dollars from the same period of last year.

Yao Jingyuan, chief economist of the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), said that the trend of consecutive economic decline was basically checked, and there were signs of economic pickup, but there were still uncertainties for future development if the external environment kept deteriorating.