We know for a fact that Starbucks, Google, etc perform accounting tricks to shift sales from the UK to Ireland.
In the end, doesn't this all trickery cancel each other out, meaning that the rankings are a fair reflection?
The article provides an estimate that 1/3rd of Chinese imports were from China itself. I have never heard any kind of claim of that magnitude leveled against the present United States.
The one point I'd like to add is that China incentivizes their companies to export through tax rebates and then incentivizes imports from HK through the absence of tariffs. The makes it profitable for companies to artificially boost exports. I have not seen similar mechanisms available in the US.
It's important to note that China does have a dual system of Governance within itself: Democracy (Hong Kong) + Communist control (Mainland). Thus it can, and does, leverage best of both worlds to doing business efficiently.
This also means that Hong Kong, for a city, is in a very strong position to grow up into a cutting edge city of future given the volumes it has to handle for mainland China.
China today is basically China, Inc. The people in charge of every aspect of the government are heavily motivated to manipulate this sort of data, just the same way as they try to cover up the pollution in their major cities. In contrast the economies and political systems in the US, Europe, etc. are far more open and not as easily vulnerable to this type of manipulation.
How about LIBOR rigging? Or traffic lane closures to spite political opponents? If anything you could argue manipulation in the US and Europe is far more sophisticated than China. For example, there's manipulation in plain sight: focus on the U-3 unemployment number rather than the U-6, never mention the labor participation rate where 92 million people in the US have given up looking for work.
And look at the news in the UK newspapers today:
The corruption of Britain: UK’s key institutions infiltrated by criminals
Secret report shows how organised crime infiltrated judicial system as well as police with prison service and HM Revenue & Customs also compromised.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/the-corruptio...
Yeah, there's corruption in the US/Europe/Japan et al, but that level of corruption is dwarfed by the deeply systemic corruption up to the highest levels in China and Russia, among other places. The fact is you can't even tell what China's GDP is within a factor of maybe +/- 50% due to that corruption.