BEIJING (Reuters) — China’s trade surplus last year jumped 74 percent to a record $177.47 billion on the back of a 27.2 percent surge in exports, the official Xinhua news agency said yesterday.Economists said the figures would increase political pressure on Beijing to let the yuan rise faster to head off the risk of protectionism by governments fearful that Chinese companies are eroding wide swathes of their manufacturing sectors.

“We think a faster pace of yuan appreciation is inevitable,” said Glenn Maguire, chief Asian economist of French bank Societe Generale in Hong Kong.

“As soon as the trade surplus starts heading through $200 billion, you are going to see the cries on both sides of the North Atlantic grow even stronger,” he said.

Xinhua said the trade surplus for December was $21 billion, just shy of November’s $22.9 billion and October’s record $23.8 billion.

Economists polled by Reuters had expected a December surplus of around $20 billion.

Xinhua said full-year exports were $969.08 billion, up 27.2 percent, while imports rose 20 percent to $791.61 billion.

Subtracting figures for the first 11 months, that gives exports in December of $94.04 billion and imports of $73.09 billion. That would imply export growth of around 25 percent from a year earlier and import growth of about 13.5 percent.

Economists had projected annual export growth of 28 percent, with imports up about 20 percent.

“There appears to be more strength in consumption globally over the fourth quarter than the consensus was looking for. The U.S. appears to be holding up and Japanese consumption is bouncing back. For open regions like Asia that is a positive and that is showing up in the export figures,” Maguire said.

He said the surplus could reach an annual rate of $250 billion by the middle of the year but would then decline as China steps up imports of consumer goods and higher-value manufacturing equipment.

Kent Yau with investment bank Core Pacific-Yamaichi in Hong Kong said the trade figures reflected China’s progress up the value chain as companies were now able to produce more of the parts they used to have to import.

“Now, obviously, they have the know-how and they have the investment, they have the technology <\m> they can make the components themselves,” Yau said.

He said he expected export growth to slow in 2007 to about 22 percent, with import growth at about 20 percent.

“Although investment is quite slow, the consumption side definitely has some more room to expand,” he said.

China has let the yuan rise just 3.9 percent since it was revalued by 2.1 percent against the dollar in July 2005 and untethered from a dollar peg to float within managed bands.