Spotlight: Overseas experts optimistic about global influence of Chinese economy

Overseas experts have expressed optimism about global influence of the Chinese economy, saying that China's economic restructuring and reforms and maintenance of stable growth will create opportunities for common development of the world.

Commenting on a somewhat slowdown in China's economic growth and a downward pressure faced by the Chinese economy, the experts generally believed that for the Chinese economy which has already profoundly integrated itself into the global system, such fluctuations and setbacks are actually related to the process of global economic revival.

In his current visit to the United States, Chinese President Xi Jinping on Wednesday reassured U.S. business leaders on the positive prospects of the Chinese economy.

"The trend of China's economy toward growth and expansion has not changed," Xi said at a China-U.S. CEO roundtable in Seattle.

"China's economic fundamentals remain solid and will continue to maintain a long-term steady growth at a medium-to-high speed," he said.

STABLE GROWTH

Roberto Dumas, a Chinese economy expert at Brazil's Insper Institute of Education and Research, said the slowdown has appeared as a result that China has actively slowed its economic growth to conduct economic restructuring.

Despite the existence of different voices, there is a consensus among international and Chinese institutions that China's economic growth is expected to reach 7 percent this year.

"After 35 years of extraordinary economic growth, China is still growing at 7 percent annually. True, that is lower than before, but still at a rate that dwarfs anything in the West," Martin Jacques, a British academic, said in an article published on Sept. 14 on the website of British newspaper The Guardian.

British Finance Minister George Osborne, during his recent visit to China, has repeatedly brushed off concerns over China's economic and financial stability, saying that the slowdown to 7 percent of the GDP growth after years of double-digit rises still puts China in a position to create a new economy the size of Britain's over the next five years.

ONGOING REFORMS

While maintaining stable economic growth, China is striving to promote economic restructuring and reforms of both systems and mechanisms, whose process is becoming increasingly clear.

Some experts hold that China is actively seeking solutions to existing problems through reforms and is ready to bear the consequences of the slowdown in economic growth.

A report from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) projected China's economic growth at 7 percent in 2016-2017 "as the government proceeds with its structural reform agenda and fixed asset investment slows."

"Despite the fall in the growth rate to around 7 percent, employment has remained buoyant," Jacques said in his article, adding that it was because "the service sector absorbs relatively more people than manufacturing."

There is also much evidence that the Chinese economy is becoming increasingly innovative.

In the first half of 2015, consumption contributes 60 percent to China's economic growth and online shopping accounts for more than 10 percent of retail sales, while the service sector already accounts for half of China's GDP.

"The Western preoccupation with headline GDP figures overlooks this deeper structural shift. Ultimately it is the ability of the Chinese economy to make the transition from a labor-intensive, investment-led, export-oriented economy to one based on value-added production and domestic consumption that will be crucial to its long-term future," Jacques said.

COMMON DEVELOPMENT

With the Chinese economy's increasing integration into the global system, China's adherence to the reform and opening up policy in the development of a new system of open economy will create new opportunities for common development of the world, according to the experts.

Yukon Huang, a senior associate in the Garnegie Asia Program and former World Bank's country director for China, said one of the reasons for China's rapid economic growth in the past three decades is that being more involved in the world economy has brought great benefits to the country itself and other regions in the world through investment, trade as well as capital and product flows.

For many years, China has been a great contributor to the global economic growth, driving the growth of other economies and even the global economy.

ADB Chief Economist Wei Shangjin said that a developing Asia is making a strong contribution to global economic growth.

Besides, Chinese enterprises have become increasingly important international investors.

Take the United States for instance. Chinese companies are now operating in 340 of the 435 U.S. congressional districts, employing more than 80,000 Americans, according to a latest report from the U.S. Rhodium Group.

The report predicted that the United States would receive 100 billion to 200 billion U.S. dollars of investment from China by 2020, and Chinese-funded U.S. affiliates would increase the number of full-time U.S. jobs to between 200,000 and 400,000.

As former French Prime Minister Jean Pierre Raffarin said, China's economic growth has great potential and is exerting positive spillover effect on the world economy. Endi