Employees working on a dry transformer production line at an electrical production plant in Haian, eastern China’s Jiangsu province, on January 4, 2021.
Stringer | AFP | Getty Images
BEIJING – China reported that GDP grew 2.3% last year, while the world struggled to contain the coronavirus pandemic.
Gross domestic product grew 6.5% in the fourth quarter over the previous year, official data from the National Bureau of Statistics showed.
However, Chinese consumers remained reluctant to spend, as retail sales fell 3.9% in the year. Retail sales in the fourth quarter increased by 4.6% over the previous year.
Online sales of consumer goods increased at a relatively rapid pace of 14.8% last year, the statistics bureau said, but the proportion of overall retail sales remained stable at around a quarter.
Economists had expected China to be the only major economy to grow last year and predicted that GDP grew by just over 2%.
Covid-19 first appeared in the Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019. In an effort to control the virus, Chinese authorities closed more than half of the country and the economy fell 6.8% in the first three months of 2020.
However, China grew again in the second quarter. Economists polled by Reuters predicted that GDP would increase 6.1% in the fourth quarter, faster than the 4.9% pace of the previous quarter.
China’s GDP growth this year will come from a low base.
In late December, the National Bureau of Statistics reduced China’s official growth rate in 2019 to 6.0%, from 6.1% previously reported. The cut occurred mainly in manufacturing, as factories dealt with new U.S. tariffs on billions of dollars in Chinese products.
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