3% GDP growth

The cost of COVID zero in 2022 was revealed in data released today by China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS): 3% annual GDP growth, only slightly better than the 2.3% of 2020, which was the lowest since 1976 and well below the target of 5.5%.

The question now, however, is how much China’s economy can recover in 2023, with no COVID zero but a lot of COVID.

This is the buzz in the Chinese business press today:

• China’s GDP in 2022 was 121.02 trillion yuan ($18 trillion), an increase of 3.0% year-on-year, per the NBS data mentioned above. Fourth quarter GDP increased by 2.9%, compared to 3.9% in the third quarter. Retail sales declined by 1.8% in December, and by 0.2% in 2022 as a whole.
• Negative population growth: The NBS also announced that China’s population decreased by 850,000 people in 2022 to 1.4118 billion, and the national birth rate fell to a record low of 6.77 births for every 1,000 people, the lowest level since 1949, and leading to the first decline in population since 1961.
• Hainan is aiming high: China’s 31 provinces and regions have set slightly lower GDP growth targets for 2023, about 0.5 to 1 percentage points lower than 2022, according to Caixin. The island province of Hainan has set the highest target of 9.5%, followed by Tibet (8%), Jiangxi and Xinjiang (7%), and Anhui, Ningxia, Hunan, and Hubei (6.5%). The four provinces with the largest economies, Guangdong, Jiangsu, Shandong, and Zhejiang, maintained a target of 5%.
• Dodgy doings at Tencent: Yesterday, tech giant Tencent 腾讯 announced that it dismissed 100 of its employees in 2022 (and handed 10 of them over to authorities) for violating the company’s “high voltage line” (高压线) set of values, originally published in 2018, which prohibits fraud, bribery, leaking of trade secrets, and disciplinary violations.