China GDP Slackens To 3%, Way Below 5.5% Target

China's gross domestic product (GDP) expanded 3% in 2022, marking one of its weakest annual performances in decades as Beijing's zero-COVID policy and faltering overseas demand battered the world's second-biggest economy, CK Tan reported for Nikkei Asia.

Photo Insert: The country's annual growth was also well off an earlier official target of 5.5% and comes after many financial institutions ratcheted down forecasts for the hard-hit economy.

The country's annual growth was also well off an earlier official target of 5.5% and comes after many financial institutions ratcheted down forecasts for the hard-hit economy.

For the October-December period, the economy grew 2.9% on year, slowing from 3.9% in the third quarter, according to official statistics released on Tuesday.

Beijing’s planners have been flustered by the near-collapse of China’s big property developers like Evergrande that engaged in the construction of residential and commercial buildings that had no buyers, pushing them to rely on state bailouts that came six months late, right smack when provincial governments were spending cash to prevent massive COVID outbreaks using Chinese vaccines that offered little defense against the virus.

In 2020, China bragged that its zero COVID policy would stop the pandemic’s deadly spread in the country of 1.4-billion.

But, two years later, Chinese President Xi Jinping had to change course as new variants emerged in the land of COVID’s birth, with China caught lying and admitting that nearly 60,000 died of COVID in December 2022.

COVID lockdowns had hit practically all of China’s major cities, and the two-month lockdown in Shanghai alone stopped industrial production and commercial transactions, causing Beijing serious losses as products could not be manufactured and shipped out.

Travel was frozen and commercial airlines stopped operating.

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