China's economic growth slows further to 7.5 pc

China's GDP growth slowed in the second quarter this year to 7.5 per cent, official data showed today, as the Chinese leadership faced fresh challenges to stimulate and revamp the world's second-biggest economy.
China's gross domestic product (GDP) declined to 7.5 per cent in the second quarter this year down from 7.7 per cent in the first quarter, amid expectations of a bailout package to halt the slide.
The data released by National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) today showed that growth in the first half of the year stood at 7.6 per cent, which is in line with market expectations and was above the government's full-year target of 7.5 per cent.

"China's economy has maintained a steady growth," Sheng Laiyun, a spokesman for the NBS, said at a press conference.
According to the NBS data, the GDP totalled 24.8 trillion yuan (USD four trillion) in the first six months.
"Major economic indicators are still within reasonable ranges as expected, but the economic environment remains complex," Sheng said, adding that the market should play a better role to bring out the economy's intrinsic vigour.

The latest GDP figures headed a string of other data showing a continuous slowdown in the world's second-largest economy after China's full-year annual growth eased to 7.8 per cent last year, its weakest since 1999.

Speculation is rife even in the official media that the government may be thinking of a bailout package but it is to be seen whether it would come at all and what would be the size of it.
Chinese government has already announced about USD 150 billion worth of stimulus package last year to be spent on various infrastructure projects for reviving the economy.
This was in addition to USD 570 billion bailout package spend to tide over the world economic crisis in 2008.
The economic slowdown in the first year of the leadership change is putting pressure on the new leadership headed by President Xi Jinping who in March succeeded the decade-old regime headed by Hu Jintao.

As the growth slowed mainly due to fall of exports due to global economic decline, concerns are mounting about rise of unemployment which in turn could have grave implications for the 64-year-long rule of the Communist Party of China (CPC).
China produced record number of 6.99 million graduates this year amid reports of them struggling to get gainful employment in a declining economy which contracted from over double digit figures in 2010 to about 7.8 per cent last year with little or no prospects of halting the slide.