SOME POSITIVE SIGNS
Some observers believe the latest data means China’s full-year growth target of around 5 per cent in 2024 will be tough to meet.
They hope the latest performance, which was largely expected, will spur policymakers to step up efforts to get its economy back on track as the year-end draws nearer.
A major drag on China’s economy has been its tumbling housing market. The beleaguered sector is undergoing a rebalancing phase between supply and demand.
“One of the key challenges right now is how China is going to rebalance the supply and the demand,” said Tommy Xie, head of Asia Macro Research at OCBC.
“It seems like it’ll still take some time, maybe another half year to one year … But in the near term, I guess the market will still face quite a number of challenges.”
Still, there were some positive signs from the new NBS data.
While China’s property woes continue, retail sales – a gauge of consumer spending – and industrial output for September grew.
Industrial output in September rose 5.4 per cent from a year earlier, up from a 4.5 per cent pace in August. Retail sales went up 3.2 per cent in September, accelerating from a 2.1 per cent growth the month before.
“I think some of the details are still quite encouraging,” Xie told CNA’s Asia Now.
“Overall, I think we are seeing resilience in external demand, (and) we are starting to see maybe some kind of a pick-up of domestic demand. So that should be good news for China to see those numbers.”
On whether China’s economy remains in an emergency mode, as some analysts have suggested, economist David Li Daokui – who is a former adviser of the People’s Bank of China, the country’s central bank – said it is “a situation of great concern”.
“The big concern is whether the momentum of the sliding down of the economy will be reversed,” he told CNA’s Asia First on the sidelines of the bilingual forum on China and the region.
