China’s economy grew 4.9 per cent in the third quarter compared with the same period in 2020 and an anaemic 0.2 per cent compared with the three months ending in June — one of its weakest performances in more than a decade.
But none of that was bad enough to deter President Xi Jinping from a range of policies that have prioritised longer-term structural changes over short-term growth as he enters the final year of his second term in power.
Chinese policymakers were instead heartened by the fact that the world’s second-largest economy has expanded 9.8 per cent over the first three quarters of 2021 compared with the same period last year — well above their full-year target of 6 per cent growth. As a result, they feel they have a “window of opportunity” to re-engineer what they see as the Chinese economy’s over-reliance on debt-fuelled property investment to generate growth, according to analysts.