OPINION> Commentary
Foundation for growth
(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-01-23 07:37

The tangible gains that China made in pursuing its long-term goals last year do not detract from the huge challenges the country faces in 2009. Yet, by laying a solid foundation for sustainable growth in future, such progress will significantly boost Chinese people's confidence to overcome the current economic difficulties.

Statistics show that China's gross domestic product grew by 9 percent in 2008 with quarterly growth slowing to 6.8 percent in the final three months.

The annual GDP figure marked an end to a five-year streak of double-digit growth for the Chinese economy. Worse, the latest quarterly growth data confirmed a rapid slowdown as the global financial crisis and economic recession hit the country hard.

With the world economy in the grip of the worst crisis in many decades, China's ability to maintain stable and relatively fast economic growth will, to a certain extent, determine the depth of the ongoing recession and the speed of its recovery.

Hence, signs that the Chinese economy is losing steam are surely a cause for concern.

However, while paying attention to quarterly changes in the country's growth momentum, one should also read these figures in the context of China's long-term growth trend.

On the one hand, a 9-percent GDP growth for all of 2008 represents no significant departure from the curve of about 10-percent annual growth China has maintained over the past three decades. Given the severity of the global financial crisis and economic slowdown, such a growth rate actually highlights the growing resilience of the Chinese economy.

On the other hand, a close look at those growth figures indicates China has made remarkable progress in industrial restructuring, as well as energy conservation.

Partly as a result of drastically slowed industrial growth later last year, the expansion of China's service sector outpaced that of the energy-consuming and resource-intensive industrial sector, raising its proportion of added value to the GDP by 3 percentage points from 2005 to 2010.

Meanwhile, China has for the first time met the annual goal of cutting energy intensity by at least 4 percent as required by the 11th Five-Year Plan to reduce energy consumption per unit GDP by 20 percent between 2006 and 2010.

Not that these achievements are good enough, but such changes are more than welcome for they are crucial to the country's long-term development.

As long as the country keeps strengthening the sustainability of its economy, it is unlikely that pessimism resulting from the current economic woes will last.

(China Daily 01/23/2009 page8)