China’s economy is running at full speed again, with industry in particular „humming“, while the retail sector is increasingly making up for its losses from the spring. This is shown by the latest figures for industrial production (7% y/y) and retail sales (5% y/y) from November. At the same time, sentiment readings from the industrial and service sectors have almost universally climbed to multi-year highs. The momentum of the Corona recovery has thus continued unabated in the closing quarter of the crisis year 2020. Economic growth is currently expected to return to pre-Corona levels, and we expect a growth rate of around six percent in the current fourth quarter. In 2020 as a whole, China is one of the very few economies to achieve positive economic growth at all.It borders on bitter irony that the country of origin of the pandemic has become one of the winners of the crisis….

The Chinese economy returned to a growth path in the past second quarter with great momentum. The gross domestic product increased by more than eleven percent compared to the previous quarter, thus fully offsetting the roughly ten percent slump at the beginning of the year. The pre-crisis level of economic output was restored and growth of 3.2 percent was achieved compared with the second quarter of 2019. That is remarkable. However, the recovery is not balanced. The industry was able to quickly resume production after the comparatively short corona lockdown in February and has now almost returned to normality. With its high share of around 40 percent, it has decisively stabilised the overall economy. Private consumption, on the other hand, continues to stumble, weighed down by people’s fears of job and income losses and of a second wave of infection. For this reason, the state has had to provide decisive…

  In most areas of the Chinese economy, signs of recovery now predominate. Not only do the survey results now signal growth again, but the „hard“ economic indicators have also turned to a recovery path. Industry has returned to its pre-crisis level and has been in the black since April. Even a slight increase in profits has now been reported. The retail sector has at least narrowed the gap to last year, at least noticeably, to which the strong sales of car dealers in recent weeks have contributed in particular. In fact, they were able to completely make up for their 80-percent decline from February. There is thus much to suggest that the figures on economic growth in the second quarter, which China will publish in about two weeks‘ time, will be good. Compared to the previous year, there should be a slight increase again, which would correspond to a…