China’s growth slowed sharply in the first quarter of 2014, raising pressure on Beijing to provide a fresh round of government stimulus to prop up faltering growth in the world’s second-largest economy. In the three months to the end of March, China’s gross domestic product expanded 7.4 per cent from the same period a year earlier, a slowdown from 7.7 per cent growth in the fourth quarter of 2013 but faster than the 7.2 per cent pace that some analysts had predicted. The expansion in the first quarter, revealed by China’s National Bureau of Statistics on Wednesday, was the slowest since the third quarter of 2012 when the government loosened monetary policy and accelerated infrastructure investment as growth dropped to 7.4 per cent. China’s slowest quarterly growth in recent years was a trough of 6.2 per cent, in the immediate aftermath of the global financial crisis in 2009. […]