BEIJING, Jan 16 (Agencies): China's economy exceeded Beijing's annual growth target in 2017, analysts said in an AFP survey, overcoming the government's battles against massive debt and pollution-spewing factories.
The world's second largest economy expanded 6.8 per cent in 2017, much better than the official target of around 6.5 per cent, according to the poll of 11 financial experts.
The reading is also an improvement on the 6.7 per cent seen the previous year, which marked its worst performance in a quarter of a century.
Premier Li Keqiang last week said he expected growth to have come in "around 6.9 per cent".
However, the forecast comes as fresh questions were raised about the veracity of the government's data after an area in the northern municipality of Tianjin became the latest place to be found to have inflated its own readings.
The government statistics bureau will release its official figures on Thursday.
"China's economic growth beat market expectations in 2017," JP Morgan Chase economist Shaoyu Guo told AFP.
Guo noted that expansion in the first three quarters of the year were "led by infrastructure and real estate investment, and supported by solid consumption and improved external demand".
Trade continued to be a major driver of growth as data last week showed exports and imports jumped in 2017, thanks to a pick-up in the global economy with the crucial US and European markets seeing strong recoveries.
The improvement at home comes in spite of government efforts to reduce the country's substantial debt and to combat its persistent pollution problems, which were both expected to curb GDP growth.
The economy eased slightly in the last quarter to 6.7 per cent, the analysts said, from 6.8 per cent in the three months prior.
"October-November data showed moderation in the manufacturing sector," Guo said, "partly reflecting stricter implementation of environmental protection policies going into the winter months."
Analysts said while policymakers are expected to focus on deleveraging in 2018, last year showed unexpected gains despite debt reduction efforts.
"In terms of China (on a macro level), 2017 was-again-full of surprises, but the good news is that most of them are positive," Larry Hu, the Macquarie Group's head of China economics, said in a report this month.
Wei Yao, chief China economist at Societe Generale, predicted continued favourable gains this year.
"The Chinese economy seems to have ended 2017 on a strong footing and this momentum, especially the part fuelled by external demand, may carry on well into 2018," Wei told AFP.
Meanwhile, the country's economy is expected to cool this year as a government-led crackdown on debt risks and factory pollution drag on overall activity, a Reuters poll showed on Tuesday.
Beijing is in the second year of a relentless campaign to wean China off its debt-heavy investment model, clamping down on everything from speculative property lending to shadow-bank financing activities as policy makers look to foster sustainable longer term growth.
That has pushed up borrowing costs and taken some of the momentum off the world's second-largest economy, especially in the final months of 2017, with growth forecast at 6.5 per cent this year, according to economists from 70 institutions surveyed by Reuters.
It was slightly above the poll's October forecast of 6.4 per cent expansion, but would still lag the survey's 2017 projection of a 6.8 per cent gross domestic product increase.
A government-led infrastructure spending spree, which partly contributed to better-than-expected growth last year, may "fare below expectations" due to tighter financial scrutiny, said Zhang Yiping, an analyst with China Merchant Securities.
A crackdown on factory pollution, which has shaved industrial output, is also expected to dent the broader economy."Probably you're going have a compounding impact on growth from all these piecemeal policies," said Qu Hongbin, Greater China Chief Economist at HSBC.
"Separately they all look great, but when you put that together at the same time, you may end up with even greater downward pressure on growth than the policymakers like to see."
China will keep its target for economic growth at "around 6.5 per cent" in 2018, unchanged from last year, policy sources have told Reuters. The country will announce Q4 and 2017 GDP growth on Thursday.
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