China’s government expects to achieve annual economic growth of “at least 6.5 percent” through 2020, the top economic official said, in the first indication of a growth target since a high-level planning meeting last week.
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A growth target below 7% would signal Beijing’s tolerance for slower growth and its priority to overhaul the economy. However, Li assured investors that China’s “economic output was still increasing at an orderly pace”, and that concerns about the slowdown were “excessive”, Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post reported.
China’s economy has slowed as Beijing tries to move the country away from an overreliance on exports and often-wasteful investment in housing, factories and infrastructure projects. The figure was shy of the nation’s 7 per cent growth target, raising expectations that Beijing would aim lower in the 13th five-year plan, running from 2016 to 2020.
The world’s second-largest economy continues to grow at almost 7 percent, Li told a gathering of business leaders in South Korea, which counts China as its largest export market.
Zhang described innovation as “the key to driving development”, and said that China should abandon its previous “fast but unsustainable development model”.
“A lower growth target is inevitable, but it will be important for the country to create a new growth engine in the next five years”, Bank of Communications analyst Liu Xuezhi said.
“I will recommend samgyetang to China through this visit… which will allow more (Chinese) people to enjoy this delicious food”, Li said in his congratulatory remarks during the closing ceremony of the 2015 China Visit Year in Seoul. It said the industrial sector still faced a “strong headwind”, and it was therefore too early to say if the situation was “bottoming out”.
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The official purchasing managers’ index for the services industry, also released Sunday, fell to 53.1 in October from September’s 53.4, adding to worries about the economy’s sluggishness because services have helped make up for manufacturing weakness. And though it remains in positive territory, the fall is a reminder of the relatively fragile consumer confidence in China highlighted by several recent reports.
