China announced today, Monday, January 18, 2021, that the country's gross domestic product (GDP) rose by 2.3% last year, while retail sales fell by 3.9% this year due to Chinese consumers' hesitance to spend.
Retail sales increased by 4.6% in the fourth quarter compared to 2020, and the GDP grew by 6.5% in the last quarter. According to economists' predictions, GDP growth was expected to be just over 2%, with China anticipated to be the only major economy that grew last year. At the end of the fourth quarter, the National Bureau of Statistics revised China's official growth rate for 2019 down to 6.0% from 6.1%. The reduction was mainly due to manufacturing, as factories dealt with new American tariffs on Chinese goods worth billions of dollars.
