China pledges to maintain steady growth, control investment

Asian Economic News, Dec 13, 2004

BEIJING, Dec. 6 Kyodo

Chinese leaders pledged at a key economic conference to maintain the country's steady economic progress while controlling excessive growth in fixed-asset investments, state media reported Monday.

The annual central economic conference, which lays out economic policy for the year ahead, reached this conclusion at a three-day meeting that ended Sunday, according to newspaper reports.

The goal for the country is to ''maintain steady and relatively fast economic growth with more emphasis on quality and efficiency,'' the China Daily said.

The closed-door meeting was attended by all nine members of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Chinese Communist Party's Central Committee, including President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao.

The reports did not contain any reference to whether China is getting closer to loosening its grip on the yuan, which is pegged to a tight range of about 8.28 to the dollar.

China has been under pressure from other countries, including the United States, to let the yuan trade more freely. Some proponents of the step say the current arrangement keeps the yuan undervalued, giving Chinese exporters an unfair trade advantage.

The reports did not mention the country's growth target for 2005. The conference comes at a time when China is implementing a series of cooling steps to slow the pace of economic growth to a more sustainable level.

Economic growth has slowed from earlier this year, but was still at a strong 9.1 percent in the July-September quarter.

Fixed-asset investment, which has fueled the Chinese economy, totaled 4.5 trillion yuan by September, up 27.7 percent from a year earlier. That was down 15.3 percentage points from the growth rate for the first quarter of the year.