A senior Chinese central banker declared this week that he had few worries. President Xi Jinping's modest target of 5% growth, reckoned to be in jeopardy not long ago, is now in sight. That success comes with big caveats, not least of which is inflation. The problem is there isn't any.

Consumer prices, languishing for a while, took a new step down in October. They dropped 0.2% from a year earlier, according to government figures released on Thursday, while factory-gate prices slipped 2.6%. That's a tad worse than economists expected, but the real disappointment is that it suggests a meaningful recovery is some time away, no matter how good gross domestic product might look in the very short term. Former People's Bank of China Governor Yi Gang once described inflation of 2% as a central banker's dream. By that yardstick, China falls short.