Are they "secretly hoarding foreign reserves" or could they simply not be good at getting statistics from anything but the central government? The latter would be pretty plausible to me; China is pretty terrible at collecting statistics (quite apart from the distortion imposed by state reporting).
That’s plausible; at the same time, it’s (notionally) in all parties’ interests to be transparent about foreign reserves. That should translate into a strong incentive to handle their own numbers correctly, but who knows.
