China's domestic consumption and demand has been slow following the pandemicJon Hicks/Getty ImagesA Chinese economist said China's official GDP figures may be higher than actual numbers.He said China's GDP is likely to grow between 3% and 4% in the next three to five years, but the official number is likely to remain at around 5%.China faces economic challenges including a real-estate crisis and high youth unemployment.A prominent Chinese economist just said what many people suspected: China's official GDP numbers may not be accurate."We do not know the true number of China's real growth figure and maybe some other numbers," Gao Shanwen, the chief economist at SDIC Securities, said on Thursday.Many people speculate that "after the pandemic, those numbers may not be so accurate," he said at an event hosted by the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, DC.