China's slowing growth neither crisis, nor cause of LatAm's problems: Mexican experts

China's slowing economic growth does not mean that the Asian giant is in crisis or it is causing trouble for the global economy, Mexican experts told Xinhua.

China's slowing economic growth and the depreciation of its currency, the yuan or the renminbi (RMB), have led to an overreaction by certain countries based on false arguments, said Enrique Dussel Peters, coordinator of the China-Mexico Studies Center at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

China reported a 6.9-percent GDP growth in 2015, the lowest growth over 25 years, down from 7.3 percent in 2014, but this should not be seen as a sign of a crisis, Dussel Peters said.

The expert said the Chinese economic growth slowed in the last year due to its transition to a growth model based on internal consumption and less dependence on exports and public investment.

He questioned why the depreciation of the RMB against the U.S. dollar should be a cause of fear at a time when the American currency is rising. He pointed out that other important countries devalued their own currencies by up to 70 percent in the past.

"The argument that China's devaluation of the RMB is somehow unfair for other currencies or designed to boost Chinese exports is invalid," the expert said.

Jose Luis Leon-Manriquez, an expert on Chinese-Latin American affairs from Autonomous Metropolitan University, said lower Chinese demand for energy and raw materials was just one of many factors that caused a drop in commodity prices.

"We have seen numerous headlines saying that China is manipulating things or that the peso is falling because of China. It seems the drop in Chinese demand has become a good excuse for many economies to seek external reasons for their internal problems," said Leon-Manriquez.

"This is not the driving factor. The drops in the currency value of emerging economies can also largely be blamed on the U.S. interest rate hike," he said.

Dussel Peters also emphasized that over 50 percent of raw materials, like oil, gas and minerals were purchased by markets such as the United States, the EU and Japan, thus China should not be mainly blamed.

The two experts made the argument that raw material exporters, currently seeing a deceleration, should take responsibilities themselves instead of blaming China, as they chose not to diversify their exports during a period of growth that lasted around a decade.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) released a report recently, saying the Chinese economy had accounted for 30 percent of global growth in the last five years and that its restructuring would open new opportunities for emerging countries. Endit