China's economy has grown consistently, between 6.7 and 7.9 percent for more than a year. Fresh data from the National Statistics Bureau showed that the manufacturing sector accounted for 85 percent of the total industries and gained 6.8 percent in growth year-on-year.
Cambridge finance Professor Simon Taylor commented on how China is shifting towards consumption.
“From a long period, when consumption grows relatively slowly compared with investment, in that sense the economy is a little bit unbalanced. But that is now gradually changing, and it is partly reflecting high incomes of Chinese people. Many of them are now spending not so much on goods but on services,” Taylor said.
The acceleration of China-US trade dispute has made China's steel exports drop continuously to a record low, at the start of 2018. Taylor said, “Trade is important, but it is much less important than it was 10 years ago."
“So the economy, since it's now shifting in the direction towards long-term growth that is driven more by domestic demand, which reduces the impact of trade… In that sense, there's a pretty good prospect of continuing growth in income and therefore a continuing growth in consumption,” Taylor added.
Meanwhile, he believed that investors are overly concerned just because the Chinese stock market performances have been lackluster, which are not even a good gauge for China's overall economy. He noted that other key indicators of business spending have been healthy.
“There has been a slowdown in investment and tax spending, but on most other majors of spending, at least so far, they are still growing at a very good rate. So, I think a lot of this passiveness, both in China and outside China, is not warranted,” Taylor said.
(CGTN's Zou Yun also contributed to the story.)