China’s resilient economy has been injecting more positive energy into the global economic recovery in the post COVID-19 pandemic era, Cambodian experts have said.
The Chinese economy maintained its recovery trend in July with major economic indicators posting steady growths in spite of the domestic COVID-19 outbreaks and heatwaves.
China’s value-added industrial output went up by 3.8 per cent year-on-year in July and 0.38 per cent over June, data from the National Bureau of Statistics of China (NBS) indicated.
The official data showed China’s retail sales of consumer goods climbed 2.7 per cent year-on-year in July, with sales of consumption-upgrading goods like jewelry and household appliances expanding fast.
Kin Phea, the Director-General of the International Relations Institute at the Royal Academy of Cambodia, said that China’s economy remained resilient in spite of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“With a series of economic stimulus measures in effect, I foresee that China’s economy will continue to recover strongly in the second half of this year, boosted by the ongoing increases in industrial production and consumption as well as innovation.
“The resilience of the Chinese economy is not only a great boom to China itself, but also to the rest of the world because China has become the stabiliser of global supply chains since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic,” he said.
Phea said the sustained and stable recovery of China’s economy had been giving impetus into the recovery of the global economy.
“China has been a locomotive of global growth for decades and there is no doubt that the world’s second largest economy would continue to be the important engine of global growth in decades to come,” he said.
China’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) expanded by 2.5 per cent in the first half of this year.
The country’s foreign trade of goods increased by 10.4 per cent year-on-year to 23.6 trillion Yuan (about 3.5 trillion U.S. dollars) during the January/July period this year, official data showed.
Joseph Matthews, a senior professor at the BELTEI International University in Phnom Penh, said China’s strong trade growth clearly reflected the recovering global trade and economy.
“The growth also proves that China has opened up its market wider for the world and has actively participated in international trade even during the pandemic,” he said.
Matthews said that China had been greatly contributing to the world’s economic development through the Belt and Road Initiative, Digital Slik Road, green economy, and blue economy, among others.
“The only way to bring back the global economy to the pre-pandemic level is to work together as one global economy and one global market,” he said.
Thong Mengdavid, a research fellow at the Phnom Penh-based Asian Vision Institute, said that the strong growth of China’s exports had resulted from the swift recovery of China’s industries.
“China’s robust growth in exports has not only benefited China itself, but also contributed to promoting global development and prosperity,” Mengdavid said.
