By ANDREW BATSON

BEIJING—China's growth unexpectedly accelerated in the first quarter of 2010, a new poll by The Wall Street Journal shows, as a rush of new bank lending and a raging property boom defied the government's efforts to keep its massive stimulus program from overheating the economy.

The finding helps explain why the Chinese government, which had been taking only mild measures to cool growth, changed tack in mid-April with the announcement of a tougher-than-expected package of restrictions on property lending and purchases. The move has sent the local stock market falling in recent weeks and has raised concerns in other countries that the clampdown on the property market may go too far and damage one of the major drivers of China's recovery.

The poll, the latest in a series the Journal has done quarterly since last year, asks economists for their estimates of China's growth in seasonally adjusted quarter-to-quarter terms. That method is how most major economies report their gross domestic product, but China officially reports only changes in GDP relative to a year earlier—a measure that can be less sensitive to turning points in the economy. The National Bureau of Statistics has said it will start publishing seasonally adjusted sequential growth rates, but hasn't done so yet, so private-sector economists make their own calculations.

According to the median estimates of 12 economists surveyed by the Journal, China's GDP in the first quarter expanded 10.7% over the previous quarter on an annualized, seasonally adjusted basis, picking up from the 10.2% annual growth rate in the fourth quarter of 2009.

That acceleration wasn't anticipated by professional forecasters. In the Journal's previous poll in February, the median forecast of economists was for the first quarter's growth to slow to 9.6%. Analysts generally had expected China's economy to continue slowing gradually from its peak in the second quarter of 2009, when the impact of the government's stimulus plan was the strongest.

The economists polled generally think that slowing process will resume after the first quarter's rise. For the second quarter of 2010, the median forecast is for a 9.8% annualized expansion from the previous quarter.

Official numbers also show economic growth accelerating recently, to 11.9% year-to-year in the first quarter from 10.7% in the fourth quarter last year. Yet the government had publicly cautioned against reading too much into the high number for the first quarter, because it was boosted by the comparison with the extremely weak economy in the first quarter of 2009. The estimates of the private-sector economists polled by the Journal suggest the first-quarter pickup wasn't all due to that base effect.

Nonetheless, the opinions of forecasters on China remain divided. Of the 12 respondents to the Journal's poll, six think growth picked up in the first quarter compared with the fourth quarter, and six think it slowed. The wide range of views, which was also seen in previous polls, reflects the difficulties that even professional economists have in figuring out the direction of the world's third-largest economy after the U.S. and Japan.

Without that clear read, China's leadership faces an even trickier task of balancing the risk that the boom may get out of control and lead to an asset bubble, and the risk that activity could slow too much and cause unemployment. Some work by government bodies also had pointed to overheating risks early this year. Unofficial estimates from the People's Bank of China, China's central bank, also show GDP growth accelerating in seasonally adjusted quarter-to-quarter terms in the first quarter, though its numbers have tended to show what private-sector analysts think is a suspiciously smooth growth trajectory.

Differences in how economists seasonally adjust GDP can produce big changes in the final number, a problem aggravated by the incomplete and sometimes conflicting official data. The latest poll results also reflect the result of recent revisions by the National Bureau of Statistics to quarterly GDP figures for previous years to show the results of an economic census in 2008.

There is less dissent over the longer-term picture. Most economists see China settling into a path of somewhat slower growth of 8% to 9% by the end of this year. That is close to what many economists think is likely to be a sustainable growth rate for China in future years.

The respondents to the latest survey include economists on the staff of Bank of America-Merrill Lynch, Capital Economics, China International Capital Corp., Citigroup Inc., Deutsche Bank AG, Goldman Sachs Group Inc., J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Morgan Stanley, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Standard Chartered Bank PLC and UBS AG, as well as the independent economist Albert Keidel.

Sourced from www.online.wsj.com