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The world’s second-largest economy grew 5,3 percent in the first quarter of this year from a year ago, according to the National Bureau of Statistics — beating the 4,8 percent growth analysts polled by Bloomberg had forecast and the 5,2 percent growth it chalked up in the fourth quarter of 2023.

“We have got off to a solid start,” Sheng Laiyun, the NBS’s deputy director, said at a press briefing in Beijing, according to Bloomberg. He said industry was an important contributor to growth, contributing to more than one-third of first-quarter growth.

Louise Loo, the China economist at Oxford Economics, wrote in a note yesterday that China’s economy was also supported in the first quarter by consumer spending for the Lunar New Year holidays in February.

Despite the rosy figures, a closer look at the figures indicates there’s still pain ahead.

March retail sales rose 3,1 percent from a year ago, missing Bloomberg forecasts of 4,8 percent growth. Industrial output for March also missed forecasts, coming in at 4,5 percent — well below the 6 percent predicted by analysts.

“’Standalone’ March activity indicators suggest weakness coming through post-Lunar New Year,” Loo said.

In particular, China’s property market continued to be in the dumps amid a debt crisis, with first-quarter new home sales by value tanking nearly 31 percent from a year ago.

Notably, the data didn’t include China’s youth-unemployment rate, which hit a record high of 21,3 percent in June 2023 before Beijing revamped the methodology for the metric to exclude full-time students.

China is in a “two-speed economy”

China’s data dump yesterday reflects the country’s changing economic landscape.

Its economy has traditionally relied on growth from real estate and lower-cost manufacturing. — Business Insider Africa.