Employees working on a dry transformer production line at an electrical manufacturing plant in Haian, Jiangsu province, China, on January 4, 2021.
Stringer | AFP | Getty Images
BEIJING – China reported GDP rose 2.3% last year as the world struggled to contain the coronavirus pandemic.
Gross domestic product grew by 6.5% in the fourth quarter from a year ago, official data from the National Bureau of Statistics shows.
However, Chinese consumers remained reluctant to spend as retail sales contracted 3.9% this year. Retail sales for the fourth quarter are up 4.6% from a year ago.
Online sales of consumer goods rose at a relatively fast pace of 14.8% last year, the statistics office said, but the share of total retail sales remained fairly stable at around a quarter.
Economists expected China to be the only major economy to grow last year, predicting GDP to grow by just over 2%.
Covid-19 first surfaced in the Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019. In an effort to get the virus under control, Chinese authorities closed more than half of the country and the economy shrank by 6.8% in the first three months of 2020.
However, China returned to growth in the second quarter. Economists polled by Reuters predicted GDP to rise 6.1% in the fourth quarter, faster than the 4.9% rate in the previous quarter.
China’s GDP growth rate will hit a lowered level this year.
In late December, the National Bureau of Statistics cut China’s official growth rate for 2019 to 6.0%, from the 6.1% previously reported. The cut was mainly in manufacturing as factories faced new US tariffs on billions of dollars worth of Chinese goods.
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