That is according to Xu Shaoshi, who heads the National Development and Reform Commission, China’s top economic planning organisation.
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Xu also said that China’s basic infrastructure investment growth increased 15 per cent past year.
Feb 3 China’s attempts to curb overcapacity will increase unemployment in provinces with high output of steel and coal, an official from the country’s top economic planner said at a briefing on Wednesday.
As Bloomberg News pointed out, 2016 is the first time China has set a range – rather than a set number – for its GDP growth goal since the 1990s.
For 2015, the target was around 7% and actual growth is estimated at 6.9%.
The comments come less than week after official data revealed the country’s manufacturing activity in January had reached the lowest point in 40 months.
The Chinese government believes GDP there will expand by 6.5 to 7 percent this year.
A more realistic outcome for the glide slope scenario for Chinese growth is a fall of 0.5% per year for the next five years taking it down to a more manageable 4% by 2020.
Diminished growth, he said, is an inevitable effect of the country’s shift to a “new normal” of slower and more sustainable expansion following the double-digit growth of the past.
He Zhicheng, chief economist at Agricultural Bank of China, said many local governments have adopted a more flexible range for local economic growth this year.
The Beijing government is trying to rebalance the world’s second-largest economy away from manufacturing and exports and towards domestic consumption.
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In particular, Xu said that the government would be able to implement its plan to cut industrial overcapacity without causing massive layoffs – and thus impacting China’s sacrosanct priority of social stability.
