“Starting from this year, we have lowered the target of economic growth,” Vice President Xi Jinping told the Irish Times in an interview published Saturday. “This will help reduce the pressure in terms of price, energy, resources and the environment.”
Xi, slated to become China’s next ruler at the end of this year, has in recent days also dismissed concerns about his country’s economy. As he told the Dublin paper, “The slowdown in China’s economic growth was, to a large extent, the result of our own macro-control measures.”
Feeling better? It’s not likely that Beijing in fact intended the economy to falter last month. Electricity consumption, the best indicator of Chinese economic activity, declined 7.5 percent. China’s aggregate financing, another good signal, collapsed, falling by almost half. New lending is the lowest it has been in five years.
Bellwether car sales? They tumbled 23.8 percent. Property prices were off for the fifth-straight month. Exports and imports were both down. Especially important, it appears that demand from consumers for foreign goods skidded. Foreign direct investment fell 0.3 percent, the third-straight month of decline, due largely to troubles in Europe….
Find out more at http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonchang/2012/02/20/rearranging-the-deck-chairs-on-the-ss-chinese-economy/
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