Strong Exports Stabilize China’s Economic Growth in Official Statistics

Surging exports and the industrial production needed to sustain them kept China’s economy growing over the past three months, even as consumer spending stagnated and investment plunged.

China’s National Bureau of Statistics announced on Monday that gross domestic product grew 1.2 percent from the second quarter of this year. If that pace continues for a year, the Chinese economy will expand at an annual rate of about 4.9 percent.

But many Western economists have become increasingly skeptical of China’s official statistics, particularly as Beijing has gradually stopped publishing thousands of narrowly focused data sets that had provided separate checks on broader economic figures. Independent estimates of recent growth have generally been only half to two-thirds as high as the official numbers.

China’s export boom from July through September, which further widened its enormous trade surplus with the rest of the world, helped shield the economy from a much worse outcome. Exports in September rose at their fastest year-over-year pace since July 2010, excluding months distorted by the timing of Lunar New Year celebrations, which disrupt factory production for weeks.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/18/business/china-economy-gdp.html