I think it's very misleading to report year-on-year earnings when clearly the 6.8% decline is concentrated in just the last few months alone. So really (and normallly), they would've announced that China shrank by 24% in the first quarter (and by that, they would normally mean at a rate of 24% annualized).

At least that's what we mean when we say the US economy is expected to take a -30% hit this quarter.