China's GDP up 6.1 percent in Q1 2009

China's economy expanded by 6.1 percent year-on-year in the first quarter of 2009, official data showed Thursday.

The quarterly growth was the slowest in the past 10 years as the global financial crisis continued to affect the world's fastest-growing economy. It was 4.5 percentage points lower than the first quarter of 2008 and down 0.7 percentage points from the previous quarter.

Gross domestic product (GDP) reached 6.5745 trillion yuan (about 939 billion U.S. dollars) in the first quarter, Ma Jiantang, director of the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), told a press conference.