Amid the smiles and the fanfare, the gold rush that has lifted China to the top of the Olympic medal mountain, questions are being asked about the value of Beijing 2008. How much, for instance, is a gold medal worth to a Chinese Olympic champion?

At previous Games, China did nothing to hide its generous cash-for-medals scheme. It proudly dished out 200,000 yuan to any of its athletes snatching gold at Athens in 2004. That is £15,610 in today's money and the financial enticement to go higher, stronger and faster this year is expected to be at least twice that.

The thing is, nobody knows for sure. There are sensitivities to consider. After the euphoria of the Olympics, the visible enrichment of China's athletes could highlight the vast chasm that exists between the nation's rich and poor. Even something as seemingly trivial as making the size of the purse public knowledge could, therefore, carry serious political risk.

But there are wider economic questions that the festivities have overshadowed but which have not conveniently gone away. The Games have cost about $50 billion (£26.8 billion) to stage, but what impact they will have on the leviathan that is the Chinese economy is open to doubt. The expected 500,000 foreign visitors seems a fairly meaningless figure, given that 130 million overseas tourists visited the country in 2007. The Olympics' overall economic impact is likely to be just a blip on the radar.

In a week's time, it will be back to business as usual for China and after the Olympic torch is extinguished, its policymakers will face perhaps their most critical balancing act in a decade as they guide the economy between inflation and slowing growth.

China is confronted by a slew of wildly conflicting economic signals. On Friday, the Government said that fixed-asset investment in urban areas, which has been the principal driving force of China's double-digit growth in GDP, had soared by more than 27 per cent since January. A day previously, it emerged that retail sales had leapt by more than 23 per cent in July alone.

Yet other figures tell a different story. Industrial production plunged sharply in July and exports have begun to shrink under the mounting pressure of a global slowdown. Chinese inflation may have dipped in recent weeks, but at 7.5 per cent, the average inflation for the first seven months of this year has been far above the Government's target.

Amid the conflicting data, views on China have become more nuanced. Economists who had put faith in the “decoupling” theory - that China and Asia have enough momentum to maintain growth through a downturn in the United States and Europe - have been forced to temper their optimism. The outright doomsayers have been forced to acknowledge that there is no crisis so far.

Official emphasis appears to have shifted towards preventing a really fierce slowdown, according to Frank Gong, a JPMorgan economist. Credit-easing, he said, may be the next move by policymakers. The Chinese Government may also use the dip in food price inflation to wean the economy off its dependence on fuel and energy subsidies.

According to Glenn Maguire, Asia chief economist at Société Générale, a clue to what Chinese policymakers are thinking lies in a recent set of published comments by China's State Information Centre (SIC). Because inflation has run above official targets this year, Beijing has been nudged into making inflation its focus and this has hampered the Government's ability to target dramatically slowing growth at the country's exporters.

The SIC suggests simply raising the inflation target to about 7 per cent, thereby granting Beijing apparent space to target growth. This may appear a fudge, Mr Maguire admitted.

Once the glamour and fireworks of the Olympics are over, the authorities will not only have to tackle slowing growth and rising prices - they will have another equally daunting task at hand, the job of establishing the sort of social, medical and financial infrastructure that China needs to secure its future. Garry Evans, HSBC's chief equity strategist, argues that its nearly 30-year-old one-child policy means that the Government has 15 years in which to build the economy into a position such that it can support large numbers of old people. It is a huge task and once the athletes have packed their bags and medals and have returned to their home countries, it seems clear that they will leave behind a China that is heading towards a period of uncertainty, unobscured by the glamour and excitement of the Olympic spectacle.

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