Its official fourth-quarter growth rate may have been its slowest in more than two years, but China's remains the economy to beat.

Jim O'Neill, the Goldman Sachs analyst who foresaw China's potential rise more than a decade ago, said the markets along with analysts and experts have been too focused on anticipating China's hard landing, that the more it is predicted, the more it does not actually happen.

"It's a bit stronger than I thought as well, actually. It is a bit of a blow for the hard landing guys, given inflation has come down so much as well," Mr O'Neill said in Bloomberg Television.

Official figures from China's statistics bureau placed the economy rose 8.9 per cent in the December fourth quarter of 2011. It exceeded the 8.7 per cent survey results made by Bloomberg News and Reuters, and even that of Xinhua News which relayed a growth of between 8.5 per cent to 8.6 per cent.

An above 8 per cent figure connotes a 'soft landing for China, SinoPac Financial Holdings Co. said, as reported by Bloomberg News.

China's domestic economic growth, and its resulting parallel contribution to the global economy, will potentially continue as the "most important thing in the world."

"Let me put it in the context of a bigger picture. I am assuming this decade China grows by 7.5 per cent. Translated into dollars, if they do that 7.5 per cent, China will contribute in dollar terms more than the U.S. and Europe put together this decade," Mr O'Neill said.

Albeit global concerns on where China is heading in the next decade and that if it could still anchor on, Mr O'Neill said the Chinese remains very much attuned to fine-tuning their very own policies, an attitude which he seems to find commendable.

"All of the concerns that many people have expressed are pretty important issues to consider. There are lots of challenges, as there frequently are with China, but the thing that generally impresses me is that Chinese policymakers themselves do not shy away from acknowledging that many of these things are issues, and they try to deal with them," the Goldman Sachs analyst said.

"The big one is the property issue... Chinese property prices have turned because the Chinese authorities have deliberately stopped them from going up. That should have been what the Fed should have done in 2005 and 2006 and maybe before that, but it is tough in a democracy. That is why you get the wild housing bubbles in many Western economies...In China's case, they are doing it deliberately to stop a bubble."

"From everything I have understood from going there for 20 years, the Chinese do not crave the exact form of democracy that we have and think they should have. They want more freedom and really want more wealth. If the Chinese authorities continue to provide that and it spreads, then I think generally speaking, the Chinese people will be happy," Mr O'Neill said.