A Chinese day trader reacts as he watches a stock ticker at a local brokerage house on August 27, 2015 in Beijing, China. (Photo : Getty Images)
The performance of China's economy in the first half of the year has been steady and the country is set to meet its main full-year development targets, Premier Li Keqiang said on Friday.
"[China's] new economy is vibrant, new business forms are booming, and new growth momentum is accumulating," Li said during his keynote speech at the 11th Asia-Europe Meeting Summit in Ulan Bator, Mongolia.
The remarks came shortly after China's key macroeconomic data was released earlier in the day. Official data revealed that China's GDP grew by 6.7 percent year on year in the first half of 2016 to reach 34.06 trillion yuan ($5.08 trillion)
"The data shows that the Chinese economy will not head for a hard landing, and there is a growing trend that the services industry has become the locomotives for China's economy," Qian Jun, a professor of finance at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University, said in an interview with the Global Times published on Saturday.
Qian added that the figure is also good news for the global economy, which faces uncertainties following Brexit and the fragile recovery of the U.S. economy.
China is confident of achieving its main development targets for this year and maintaining medium-high economic growth rates to bring the economy to medium-high levels of development, said Li.
Economic growth in the second quarter of the year was slightly faster than official estimates, holding steady from the first quarter and raising hopes that the economy has entered a period of relatively slower but steady growth, according to the Xinhua News Agency.
Overall, June activities are much stronger than expected and China is on track to achieve its growth target for this year, said Zhu Haibin, chief economist of JP Morgan China.
Tom Rafferty, an economist at the London-based Economist Intelligence Unit, told the Global Times that it will be a challenge to identify where growth will come from in the coming months.
"The greatest concern is the ongoing slide in private-sector investment," he said.
However, Sheng Laiyun, a spokesman of the National Bureau of Statistics, said the stabilization of the Chinese economy is set to continue.
He elaborated that major indicators are operating in a reasonable zone while supply-side structural reform and economic restructuring continue to advance.
