By Li Zheng, China’s consumer market is thriving this summer.
Family trips and cross-province tours are recovering. A prosperous night economy represented by night markets, midnight snacks and night boating activities is enriching urban business forms. The booming consumption exactly mirrors the strong vitality of the Chinese economy.
The country’s macro economy is showing signs of recovery and growth. On July 17, the National Bureau of Statistics said that China’s GDP grew 5.5 percent in the first half of 2023, surpassing the 3-percent growth in 2022 and the annual average growth of 4.5 percent from 2020 to 2022.
This proves that the Chinese economy is gradually walking out of the shadow of COVID-19 and getting back to its normal track. The obvious rebound trend indicates the high value of the Chinese economy.
The high value comes from China’s tremendous development resilience, which can be well explained by the country’s optimized trade structure.
This year, the global economy has shown a weak recovery. The sluggish global trade inevitably hindered China’s imports and exports.
Against such a backdrop, the total export value of China’s three major tech-intensive green products – lithium-ion batteries, solar batteries, and electric vehicles – soared 61.6 percent year-on-year in the first half of 2023. The value of general trade accounted for 65.5 percent of the country’s total.
New forms of foreign trade such as cross-border e-commerce were in rapid development, which not only offset the contraction of the overseas market demand, but also made the trade sector more diverse.
In fact, the willpower to conquer all types of risks and challenges, as well as the capabilities to flexibly maneuver and complete self-upgrade, is exactly what makes the strong resilience of the Chinese economy.
From a global perspective, China’s economic growth in the first half of 2023 was high among major economies around the world, and it provided important support for the development of the global economy.
The high value also comes from the vitality of China’s development.
Recently, the second domestically-developed large passenger aircraft C919 was delivered to China Eastern Airlines.
Also this year, China’s first domestically-built large cruise ship left the dock, and its Long March-2D carrier rocket set a national record for the most spacecraft transported on a single mission. The demonstration project of Hualong One, China’s homegrown third-generation nuclear power reactor design, passed the final acceptance tests.
Innovation-driven development is releasing new momentum for China’s high-quality development.
Structural optimization and transformation of development models can be observed in China’s economic recovery. In the January-June period, investment in high-tech industries grew by 12.5 percent year-on-year, the production of new energy vehicles jumped 35 percent, and final consumption contributed over 70 percent to the country’s economic growth.
This explains that the Chinese economy is growing with better quality and higher efficiency.
As the country builds stronger growth drivers and steadily improves its development quality, the Chinese economy will enter stages toward a higher-level form, a more sophisticated division of labor, and a more optimized structure.
China, currently at a key stage of economic recovery and industrial upgrading, is seeing cyclical contradictions and structural problems.
In the future, China needs to continue comprehensively deepening reform and opening up, accelerate the modernization of the industrial system, ensure smooth economic circulation and make more efforts to transform growth models, make structural adjustments and strengthen growth drivers.
The country should also issue and implement, in a timely manner, a batch of targeted, coordinated and synergetic policies and measures on stabilizing growth, ensuring employment, and guarding against risks.
Challenges build barriers for the time being, but they are a ladder to better development in the long run. China, witnessing recovery and growth in the first half of this year, has profoundly learned new situations and problems of its economy, and improved its policies and measures, to bring the full potential of its advantages and dynamism.
It is believed that China has the conditions and capability to achieve its full-year growth targets.
