With all the major political and economic events, as well as many other such events on a smaller scale, how do we know which event affects cycles, which event affects volatilities, and which event triggers trend break? So far there is little empirical work on this important question. This paper makes two contributions. First, we construct a set of core macroeconomic and financial time series for China to be as consistent with the U.S. national income and productaccount (NIPA) as possible, all in level on quarterly frequency from 1991Q1 to present (2014Q1). Second, we develop a new econometric method for decoupling cycles from trends and volatilities in the Chinese time series. Our results are important because they provide the benchmark empirical data and analysis for China’s macroeconomy.