China Annual GDP Growth Rate

I think that these days the announcement of the Chinese annual growth fugures qualifies to appear in an ‘events’ section!

This year the growth rate has come in at 6.2% and, although the headlines are that this is the slowest annual growth since 1992 when the economic ‘miracle’ really kicked off, this represents a significant achievement against the backdrop of declining global growth and all the skirmishes in the on-off trade war with the USA.  I am sure that there will be a great deal of Western commentary which classifies these figures as potentially disasterous but this would be a massive misrepresentation of the reality on the ground in Asia.

On the many China cultural awareness training programmes that we run at Global Business Culture, we always stress the long-term thinking that permeates China at both a macro and corporate level.  (Belt and Road is the visible manifestation of this embedded long-term strategising.) The Chinese play the long game – they always have done – and these slightly lower growth figures will not elicit the same alarm in China as will be generated in the Western media.

The whole of Asia is on an unstoppable economic upward trajectory and China is at the fulcrum of this trend.  A virtuous economic cylcle of cause and effect leaves China helping drive economic development throughout the Asia region and the growth of the region as a whole helps further lock-in continuing Chinese success.

The increase in demand for China cultural awareness training that we have seen at Global Business Culture over the past few years is an infinitessimal bi-product of the increasing importance of China to the world economy – a slight drop in the annual GDP growth numbers will not change the direction of the march of history.