Despite the US trade war, China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said on Monday that the country has met its growth targets after recording a 6.3 percent rise in GDP and an 8.8 percent rise in average disposable incomes.
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Analysts awaited the publication of growth figures to see if U.S. sanctions and tariff war would hinder China’s ability to reach the government’s official growth targets, which were a 6 percent rise in GDP for the first half of 2019.
Some of the country’s strongest growth areas are high-tech manufacturing which has grown by 9 percent , production of low-energy cars and solar batteries which rose by 34.6 percent and 20.1 percent respectively during the same 6 month period.
The 6.3 percent figure is far higher than Western countries. Those within the Eurozone for example, reported an average growth of just 0.4% in the first quarter of 2019, in that same period China reached 6.4%.
Nevertheless, Chinese officials hope for much stronger growth, blaming tensions with the US and the slow growth globally for the ‘downward pressure’ on the global economy.
Speaking to state media on Monday, Cong Yi, an economics professor at Tianjin University said that “China's consumption power, driven by strong spending demand from Chinese people, will continue to be a stabilizer for the country's economic growth.”
China has had a number of trade conflicts with the U.S. which has resulted in the Trump administration placing punitive tariffs on Chinese goods, there have also been limited economic sanctions, such as Trump’s announcement that U.S. firms cannot work with China’s flagship telecom firm Huawei. Some analysts have said that these moves are attempts by the U.S. to stifle China’s economic rise.