BEIJING — China’s economy slowed further in the fourth quarter of 2011, the government reported, lowering the growth in gross domestic product for the year to 9.2 percent, from 10.4 percent in 2010.

The gross domestic product grew at an annual rate of 8.9 percent in the last three months of the year, down from 9.1 percent in the third quarter of last year. It was the slowest pace since the second quarter of 2009, when the rate was 7.9 percent.

Economists had forecast that the rate of growth could drop to as little as 8.5 percent for the quarter as a slowing global economy cooled demand for Chinese products and the government’s inflation-fighting measures clamped down on domestic expansion.

Industrial production increased 12.8 percent in December compared with the same period a year earlier, the national Statistics Bureau stated. A Bloomberg survey of economists had predicted a 12.3 percent increase, which would have been the smallest in more than two years.

Advertisement Continue reading the main story

“It all looks pretty robust, I have to say,” Arthur Kroeber, the managing director of Dragonomics, an analytics firm in Beijing, said by telephone. “Export growth has been slowing and we’ll expect that to continue because Europe is just dreadful, and that’s China’s best export market. But even with those kinds of negative factors in the mix, the basic structure of the economy is still O.K.