China's Local Governments Successively Lower Growth Targets for This Year

-"Quality Over Growth Speed" Reflecting Central Government's Direction

[Asia Economy Beijing=Special Correspondent Park Sun-mi] As Chinese local governments have successively lowered their economic growth rate targets for this year, it reflects the central government's policy direction of prioritizing 'quality' over 'speed' of growth.

On the 20th, growth rate targets for this year from 31 provincial-level local governments in China, revealed by Chinese media, were mostly revised downward. Twenty-one local governments set their growth rate targets lower than last year.

In the case of the capital city Beijing, last year's growth rate was 6.2%, but this year the target was set at 6%. Guangdong Province, with the largest economic scale in China at 10.5 trillion yuan, also set this year's growth rate target at 6%, lower than last year's 6.3%.

Some rapidly growing regions also changed their plans to slow down the pace of economic expansion. A representative case is Guizhou Province in the southern region, which recorded a 9% growth rate last year due to aggressive infrastructure investment, but set this year's growth rate target at 8%. The only places that noticeably raised their growth rate targets this year were a few regions like Tianjin City (from 4.5% last year to a 5% target this year) that had experienced sluggish growth.

The downward revision of growth rate targets by Chinese local governments reflects the central government's policy direction that prioritizes higher quality over the speed of economic growth. There was also pressure from the central government to break the local governments' practice of distorting growth rates by inflating statistics after setting high economic growth rate targets. Due to the central government's previous focus on growth speed, there was a large gap between the GDP figures announced by the central government and the sum of GDP figures reported by local governments, leading to criticism that local governments frequently manipulated statistics.

As Chinese local governments lower their growth rate targets this year, there is increasing likelihood that the central government's growth rate target at the upcoming National People's Congress and Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (the "Two Sessions") in March will also be set lower than last year's 6.1%. Experts expect this year's growth rate target to be around 6%.

China aims to double its GDP size from 2010 by this year, but even if this year's growth rate is lower than last year's, achieving the goal is not difficult. This is because the Chinese government revised downward the previously announced GDP figures for the 2014?2018 period based on the results of the 4th National Economic Census, creating some leeway for this year's GDP target.

Yan Su, an economics professor at Peking University, said, "The minimum growth rate required this year to achieve the government's doubling target has been lowered from the previous 5.8% to 5.5%, and only four out of the 31 local governments set their growth rate targets below 5.5%. It appears that the Chinese economy this year does not need strong stimulus measures but only countercyclical adjustments to ensure employment."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.