China's economy performed better than expected in last year's fourth quarter, helping to wrap up 2010's economic output at 39.7 trillion yuan (US$6.1 trillion), up 10.3 percent from a year earlier, the National Bureau of Statistics said yesterday.
Its gross domestic product expanded 9.8 percent in the final quarter, boosted by robust industrial production and retail sales. It picked up from the pace of 9.6 percent in the previous three months and was better than market estimates of 9.4 percent.
China's advancing rate in 2010, compared with 2009's 9.2 percent, ran far beyond last year's global average of close to 5 percent.
"China's economy is basically well shaped," Ma Jiantang, head of the statistics bureau, told a press conference yesterday. "China managed to cope with a complicated economic environment last year and landed with a stable growth."
Last year, a sovereign debt crisis was unfolding in Europe and other major economic powerhouses such as the United States and Japan were struggling to keep their recovery alive.
Ma said domestic demand has jumped to contribute nearly 92 percent for China's economic growth last year, but he also pointed out that China's growth pattern remained resources-intensive that cost excessive energy and that the country required a bolder and broader restructuring to sustain development.
How to balance between an overheated economy and a cooling one continued to be a test for policy-makers.
China has announced to shift to a prudent monetary policy stance, but will keep the policy flexible to reflect up-to-date situations.
The manufacturing sector expanded 12.2 percent from a year earlier to 18.6 trillion yuan last year, leading services sector, which gained 9.5 percent to 17.1 trillion yuan, and agricultural parts industry, which rose 4.3 percent to 4 trillion yuan.
China is targeting 8 percent growth this year and expects to revamp its economy to a services-led type that relies less on exports of low value-added products. A World Bank report released last week forecast China's economy will expand 8.7 percent this year.
The consumer price index, the main gauge of inflation, rose 4.6 percent on an annual basis in December, easing from November's 28-month high of 5.1 percent and settling the whole year's rate at 3.3 percent.
"The inflationary pressure in China remains a headache for policy-makers," said Zhu Jianfang, an analyst at CITIC Securities Co. He expected China will raise the interest rate again this month at hte earliest.
Premier Wen Jiabao said on Tuesday China would focus on reining in food prices and the housing market in an outline of the government's key work for the first quarter, reinforcing their determination to control inflation.
China has lifted interest rate twice in the past four months and the reserve requirement ratio last Friday to a record high of nearly 20 percent.
