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My Take | China can afford to abandon its GDP target, but not its promise of economic growth
- With the exception of 2020, China had never given up on trying to reach its annual economic growth target in the past several decades
- The GDP target is just a number, but it is the government’s thinking behind China’s economic growth that matters to citizens and businesses
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China’s top leadership has quietly given up on its target of 5.5 per cent gross domestic product (GDP) growth this year, an unusual move for an objective that was endorsed by the National People’s Congress and seen as the single most important measure of the government’s performance, even as Beijing tries to play down the indicator’s significance.
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With the exception of 2020, when China did not set an economic growth target because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the country has indicated an annual GDP goal every year for the past decades to let the world know about its general view on the national economy.
Once the target was set, the government had always delivered, with the rare exception of 1998, when China’s GDP growth was just 0.2 percentage point shy of the target of 8 per cent, as Chinese exports were hit by the Asian financial crisis.
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China aims for modest 5.5% GDP growth in 2022, citing economic pressures
China aims for modest 5.5% GDP growth in 2022, citing economic pressures
That slight miss was enough to trigger a drastic economic policy response from then-Premier Zhu Rongji.
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