A property crisis continued, and weak consumption in the country dampened an economic recovery in July, with data released by the National Bureau of Statistics on Thursday.
Unemployment edged up for the first time since February; the number stood at 5.2 per cent, from 5 per cent it was in June.
On the factory floor, too, production increased more slowly last month, at a year-on-year rate of 5.1 per cent in July compared to 5.3 per cent in June.
Retail sales in July increased by 2.7 per cent from the same period last year, slightly higher than the 2 per cent rise in June.
The recovery of consumption will be further consolidated with the recent introduction of a series of measures by local governments to stimulate consumption, said Liu Aihua, a spokeswoman for the statistics bureau.
Last month, Beijing said it would spend 150 billion yuan ($20.9 billion) in government debt on programs designed to subsidise trade-ins for consumer goods such as home appliances and cars to encourage spending.
Consumption accounted for about 60 per cent of China’s economic growth in the first half of the year and is expected to play an even bigger role in supporting the world’s second-largest economy. For a long time, exports have been the strongest engine for China’s economic growth and are dampened by friction with the United States and other Western countries.
Liu also said the rate rise in urban unemployment—a ticklish problem for the ruling Communist Party—was propelled by the impact of the graduation season.
Real estate investment dropped 10.2 per cent in the first seven months of the year compared with the previous year, performing slightly worse than a 10.1 per cent fall in the January-June period.
Developers’ excessive borrowing has resulted in a long slump in China’s property market, pushing housing sales and prices lower while pulling down many other parts of the economy with it, from construction and building materials to home appliances.