They didn't so much falsify it, as "made it happen". You can have as much GDP growth as you want by building empty houses and tearing down and rebuilding bridges.

The problem is that if you keep doing that, eventually the lack of generated growth will come back to bite you. Because you are either racking up massive debt, or spending your revenue on none productive investments.

That means you either build a giant debt bubble that will eventually implode if you use debt. Or lower you competiveness if you use the "profits" on malinvestnments. In China there is a lot of both going on.

It's everything from infrastructure projects that may never pay off. Lack of environmental "cost" due to lack of regulations etc, that will generate massive costs in the future (starting to run out of drinkable groundwater for example). Then there's the giant elephant in the room with their real-estate bubble and using empty apartments as "savings accounts".

It's fairly easy to generate GDP growth in the short term (1-2 decades), it's a lot harder to do it sustainably (a entire lifetime).