China’s Economy Grew Steadily, Thanks to Loans and Homes<br />“While recent policies to contain financial risks have slowed the pace of debt accumulation, China has yet to achieve stabilizing debt ratios,<br />and is farther still from outright deleveraging,” Andrew Fennell, the director of sovereign ratings at Fitch Ratings, wrote in an email.<br />Still other figures — including retail spending, housing sales<br />and trade figures — suggest an economy growing steadily under the guiding hand of the government.<br />Heavy lending by state-owned banks, brisk government spending and strong exports helped keep China’s economy growing briskly and steadily.<br />Zhou Xiaochuan, the long-serving governor of the central bank, warned in a speech in Washington on Sunday<br />that a large chunk of the debt accumulated by Chinese state-owned enterprises might actually represent disguised borrowing by local governments.<br />China’s statistical agency said on Thursday that the economy had grown 6.8 percent<br />in the July-to-September period, compared with the same quarter a year ago.<br />Addressing the Communist Party Congress on Wednesday, Mr. Xi told officials, “Real estate is for living in, not for speculation.”<br />Plenty of people in China apparently feel otherwise.<br />President Xi Jinping had put heavy pressure on practically every government ministry to make sure that the economy put in a solid performance.<br />The figure announced on Thursday was similar to other results from recent quarters, a trend<br />that makes many economists doubt the reliability of China’s headline economic numbers.
