https://arab.news/nqxk9
Despite a fraught geopolitical environment and a US-led trade war in 2025, China achieved its growth target of 5 percent, with gross domestic product reaching 140.19 trillion yuan ($20.4 trillion). The contributions to last year’s GDP growth from the three components of aggregate demand — final consumption, capital formation and net exports — were 52 percent, 15.3 percent and 32.7 percent, respectively.
Despite the impressive overall growth performance for 2025, the structure of aggregate demand was problematic. Consumption growth, as measured by total retail sales of consumer goods, stood at only 3.7 percent year on year. Fixed asset investment, a proxy for capital formation, fell by 3.8 percent. Of the three main categories of fixed asset investment, manufacturing investment grew by 0.6 percent, significantly slower than in the year-earlier period, while real estate investment plummeted by 17.2 percent and infrastructure investment fell by 2.2 percent, the first annual decline since statistics became available.
Unexpectedly, net exports in 2025 remained as strong as in 2024, registering a trade surplus of 8.5 trillion yuan. In the absence of official data on the share of net exports in GDP at the beginning of 2025, one can reasonably infer that China’s net exports grew at a double-digit rate.
