"For the whole year, we are expected to achieve the target of about five percent economic growth set at the beginning of this year," Li said as he opened a meeting of global political and business leaders in northern China.
"Recently, some international organisations and institutions have also raised their forecasts for China's economic growth this year, showing their confidence in China's development prospects," Li added at the World Economic Forum.
China is grappling with a slowing post-Covid recovery, with a number of lacklustre indicators in recent weeks signalling the rebound is running out of steam.
Beijing's central bank last week cut two key interest rates in a bid to counter the slowdown in the world's second-largest economy.
Reports this month have suggested Beijing is lining up a tranche of measures targeting multiple areas of the economy, particularly the real estate sector, which makes up a huge portion of gross domestic product.
Beijing set an economic growth target of "around five percent" in March, one of its lowest in decades as it emerged from strict zero-Covid rules that hammered business activity.
Premier Li at the time admitted the target would be "no easy task".
China censors prominent journalist who raised concerns about economy
Beijing (AFP) June 27, 2023 -
A prominent Chinese financial journalist who has compared the country's economic problems to the Great Depression has been banned from social media.
The Weibo account of Wu Xiaobo, an influential business journalist and author with more than 4.7 million followers, "is currently in a banned state due to violation of relevant laws and regulations", according to a banner displayed on his page on Tuesday.
Content moderators on Weibo -- a Twitter-like platform -- said on Monday they had blocked three verified users for "spreading smears against the development of the securities market" and "hyping up the unemployment rate".
Weibo did not give the full usernames of the blocked accounts, but said one of them had a three-character name starting with "Wu" and ending with "Bo".
China's post-Covid economic recovery has faltered, with lacklustre data in recent weeks signalling that the rebound is running out of steam.
Wu's Weibo page appeared on Tuesday to have been scrubbed of all content posted since April 2022.
Wu did not immediately respond to AFP's request for comment.
His regular column on the website of the Chinese financial magazine Caixin has long detailed the country's economic woes, including a declining birthrate and skyrocketing youth unemployment.
"The huge army of the unemployed is likely to become a fuse that ignites the powder keg," he wrote in a May column that compared the situation with the Great Depression of the 1930s.
In another recent column, he asked whether monetary easing would be able to "solve current economic problems".
Those columns, however, had not been scrubbed from the internet as of Tuesday.
China's domestic media is state-controlled, and widespread censorship of social media is often used to suppress negative stories or critical coverage.
Regulators have previously urged investors to avoid reading foreign news reports about China, while analysts and economists have been suspended from social media for airing pessimistic views.
Related Links
Global Trade News
| Subscribe Free To Our Daily Newsletters |
| Subscribe Free To Our Daily Newsletters |
