AFP

China said Monday it will delay the release of economic growth figures, as the country’s leadership gathers for a major meeting set to hand President Xi Jinping a historic third term in office.

The announcement comes a day before analysts had expected Beijing to publish some of its weakest quarterly growth figures since 2020 with the economy hobbled by Covid-19 restrictions and a real estate crisis.

The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said the release of growth figures for the third quarter along with a host of other economic data would be “postponed”, without specifying a reason or giving a new timeline.

The delay comes as officials from China’s ruling Communist Party meet in Beijing for their 20th Congress, which is set to rubber stamp Xi’s bid to rule for another term.

Zhao Chenxin, senior official at the National Development and Reform Commission, told reporters on Monday that “the economy rebounded significantly in the third quarter”.

“From a global perspective, China’s economic performance is still outstanding,” he said.

But many analysts expect the world’s second-largest economy to struggle to reach its growth target this year of around 5.5 percent, with the International Monetary Fund lowering its forecast for GDP expansion to 3.2 percent.

A panel of experts polled by AFP last week predicted an average of three percent growth in 2022 — a long way off the 8.1 percent seen last year.

That would be China’s weakest growth rate in four decades, excluding 2020 when the global economy was hammered by the emergence of the coronavirus.

The NBS said it would also postpone the release of monthly data on indicators including real estate and retail sales.

Last week customs authorities delayed the release of September trade figures without providing an explanation.

– China ‘in a bind’ –

Nick Marro, lead for global trade at the Economist Intelligence Unit, told AFP that signs point to “a really ugly Q3 data print, at a time when the party is focused on highlighting its policy achievements, while minimising any missteps”.

Alicia Garcia Herrero, chief economist at Natixis, said “nothing, not even GDP data release, can disturb the coronation of Xi Jinping”.

The delay “puts China in a bind”, Marro added.

“If it comes out with a rosier-than-expected data print, the national statistics bureau will inevitably face questions around data veracity,” he said.

China’s economy has been hit hard by the government’s strict zero-Covid policy.

The country is the last of the world’s major economies to continue to follow the strategy, which imposes tight travel restrictions, mass PCR testing and obligatory quarantines.

It also involves sudden and strict lockdowns — including of businesses and factories — that have disrupted production and weighed heavily on household consumption.

China is also battling an unprecedented crisis in its real estate sector — historically a major driver of growth that accounts for more than a quarter of GDP when combined with construction.

Following years of explosive growth fuelled by easy access to loans, Beijing launched a crackdown on excessive debt in 2020.

Property sales are now falling across the country, leaving many developers struggling and some owners refusing to pay their mortgages for unfinished homes.

Britain’s new finance chief Jeremy Hunt will Monday bring forward fiscal measures to further calm markets turmoil, in another government U-turn that appears to have left Liz Truss’s position as prime minister hanging by a thread.

Chancellor of the Exchequer Hunt, parachuted into the job on Friday to replace sacked Kwasi Kwarteng, will at 1000 GMT trail measures from a fiscal plan due October 31.

Hunt, who is Britain’s fourth finance minister in as many months, will also address lawmakers over his plans at 1430 GMT.

The news sent the British pound surging more than one percent against the dollar, while bond yields fell sharply on investor relief.

Truss fired her close friend Kwarteng on Friday after their recent tax-slashing budget sparked markets chaos, fuelling intense speculation over her political future one month after taking office.

Hunt’s announcement “will support fiscal sustainability”, the Treasury said in a statement, after last month’s notorious budget had sent bond yields spiking and the pound collapsing to a record dollar low on fears of rocketing debt.

“This follows… further conversations between the prime minister and the chancellor over the weekend, to ensure sustainable public finances underpin economic growth,” the Treasury added.

– ‘Too far, too fast’ –

Tax reductions were the centrepiece of the ill-starred budget, but they were financed via huge borrowing.

Truss has already staged two humiliating budget U-turns, scrapping tax cuts for the richest earners and on company profits.

Following his shock appointment, Hunt hit the ground running Saturday with a warning of tax hikes as he dramatically reversed course on right-wing Truss’ radical programme of economic reform.

The mini budget on September 23 went “too far, too fast”, he declared over the weekend.

And Hunt warned he was “not taking anything off the table” amid speculation of painful spending cutbacks on critical areas like defence, hospitals and schools.

Hunt met with the governor of the Bank of England and the head of the Debt Management Office to discuss his plans late on Sunday.

In the wake of turmoil, the BoE was forced to launch an emergency bond-buying policy but this ended on Friday.

The furore over the budget, which also contained a costly freeze on domestic energy prices to ease Britain’s cost of living crisis, has reportedly sparked a plot to oust the prime minister.

British media reported that senior Conservative members of parliament were plotting to unseat Truss, aghast at the party’s collapse in opinion polls since she replaced Boris Johnson on September 6.

Party grandee and former leader William Hague said Truss’ premiership was “hanging by a thread” after Kwarteng was unceremoniously fired.

– Another U-turn –

Monday’s news sent the UK’s 30-year bond yield sliding to 4.46 percent.

“The bringing forward of the fiscal statement is in itself another U-turn, given that the government had been sticking to the Halloween date for its release, even on Friday,” noted Hargreaves Lansdown analyst Susannah Streeter.

“But worries that the bond markets in particular will take fright again has prompted fresh urgency for damage limitation so a roll-back of planned tax cuts is now expected.”

China  said Monday it will delay the release of economic growth figures, as the country’s leadership gathers for a meeting set to hand President Xi Jinping a historic third term in office.

The announcement comes a day before China had been expected by analysts to announce some of its weakest quarterly growth figures since 2020, as the economy is hobbled by Covid-19 restrictions and a real estate crisis.

Beijing’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) announced that the release of growth figures for the third quarter along with a host of other economic data would be “postponed”, without specifying a reason for the delay or giving a new timeline.

The postponement comes as officials from China’s ruling Communist Party gather in Beijing for their 20th Congress, which is set to rubber stamp Xi’s bid to rule for another term.

Zhao Chenxin, senior official at the National Development and Reform Commission, told reporters on Monday morning that “the economy rebounded significantly in the third quarter.”

“From a global perspective, China’s economic performance is still outstanding,” he said.

But many analysts had expected the world’s second-largest economy to struggle to reach its growth target this year of around 5.5 percent, with the International Monetary Fund lowering its GDP growth forecast to 3.2 percent for 2022.

A panel of experts polled by AFP last week predicted average growth of three percent in 2022 — a long way off the 8.1 percent seen in 2021.

That would have marked China’s weakest growth rate in four decades, excluding 2020 when the global economy was hammered by the emergence of the coronavirus.

Separately, customs authorities delayed the release of September’s trade figures last week, without providing an explanation, while the NBS said on Monday it would also postpone the release of monthly data on indicators including real estate and retail sales.

– Covid impact –

China’s economy has been hit particularly hard by the government’s strict zero-Covid policy.

The country is the last of the world’s major economies to continue to follow the strategy, which imposes tight travel restrictions, mass PCR testing and obligatory quarantines.

It also involves sudden and strict lockdowns — including of businesses and factories — that have disrupted production and weighed heavily on household consumption.

China is also battling an unprecedented crisis in its real estate sector — historically a driver of growth in the economy and representative of more than a quarter of the country’s GDP when combined with construction.

Following years of explosive growth fuelled by easy access to loans, Beijing launched a crackdown on excessive debt in 2020.

Property sales are now falling across the country, leaving many developers struggling and some owners refusing to pay their mortgages for unfinished homes.

France on Monday braced for nationwide transport strike actions as the government and unions remained in deadlock over stoppages at oil depots that have sparked fuel shortages.

Leading unions have called for strikes Tuesday in their biggest challenge yet to President Emmanuel Macron since he won a new presidential term in May.

It will come after workers at several refineries and depots operated by energy giant TotalEnergies voted to extend their strike action, defying the government which has begun to force staff back on the job.

Motorists scrambled to fill tanks as the fuel strike, which has lasted for nearly three weeks, crippled supplies at just over 30 percent of France’s service stations.

The government, increasingly impatient with striking workers, said it was forcing key staff back to work.

“The time for negotiation is over,” Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire told the BFMTV broadcaster Monday. 

The government said it would begin to requisition workers at the Feyzin depot in southeastern France from 2.00 pm (1200 GMT) on Monday, having already employed the same strategy at the Mardyck depot in the north of the country.

Fuel workers voted to continue stoppages at several refineries run by TotalEnergies, the coordinator for the hard-left CGT union Eric Sellini said, rejecting a pay package agreed between the group’s management and mainstream unions.

Three out of seven of the country’s oil refineries and five major fuel depots (out of around 200) are affected, the government said.

Strike action at Esso-ExxonMobil ended at the end of last week at the company’s two French refineries, after a pay deal between management and moderate unions which represent a majority of workers.

A return to normal supply conditions at petrol stations will take at least two weeks after strikes end, the government has warned.

– ‘Severe disruptions’ –

Unions in other industries and the public sector have also announced action to protest against the twin impact of soaring energy prices and overall inflation on the cost of living.

Leftist unions CGT and FO have called for a nationwide strike Tuesday for higher salaries, and against government requisitions of oil installations, threatening to cripple public transport in particular.

Rail operator SNCF will see “severe disruptions” with half of train services cancelled, Transport Minister Clement Beaune said.

Suburban services in the Paris region as well as bus services will also be impacted, operator RATP said, but the inner-Paris metro system should be mostly unaffected.

Beyond transport workers, unions hope to bring out staff in sectors such as the food industry and healthcare, CGT boss Philippe Martinez told France Inter radio.

Their action will kick off what is likely to be a tense autumn and winter as Macron also seeks to implement his flagship domestic policy of raising the French retirement age.

But the economic squeeze partly caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, along with the failure of Macron’s party to secure an overall majority in June legislative polls, only adds to the magnitude of the task.

On Sunday tens of thousands of protesters marched in Paris to express their frustration at the rising cost of living.

The demonstration was called by the left-wing political opposition and led by the head of the France Unbowed (LFI) party, Jean-Luc Melenchon.

Security forces fired teargas and launched baton charges after they were pelted with objects, while on the fringes of the march, masked men dressed in black ransacked a bank.

Some protesters wore yellow fluorescent vests, the symbol of the often violent anti-government protests in 2018 that shook the pro-business government of Macron.

“We’re going to have a week the likes of which we don’t see very often,” Melenchon told the crowd.

Organisers claimed 140,000 people attended Sunday’s march, but police said there were 30,000.

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Saudi Arabia has rejected US accusations of aligning itself with Russia amid the Ukraine war by making oil production cuts to drive up crude prices, insisting it was purely a business decision.

“We are astonished by the accusations that the kingdom is standing with Russia in its war with Ukraine,” the Saudi defence minister, Prince Khaled bin Salman, tweeted late Sunday.

The Saudi-led OPEC+ cartel — which includes Russia — has angered Washington by deciding to cut production by two million barrels per day from November, adding further pressure on soaring crude prices.

“It is telling that these false accusations did not come from the Ukrainian government,” Prince Khaled wrote. “Although the OPEC+ decision, which was taken unanimously, was due to purely economic reasons, some accused the kingdom of standing with Russia.

“Iran is also a member of OPEC, does this mean that the kingdom is standing with Iran as well?” he asked, referring to Saudi Arabia’s regional rival.

In a speech broadcast on Sunday night, Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud insisted his country was “working hard, within its energy strategy, to support the stability and balance of global oil markets”.

The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, which like Saudi Arabia are US allies as well as OPEC partners, also defended the cartel’s decision as a “technical” move.

White House spokesman John Kirby said last week that Riyadh knew the cut “would increase Russian revenues and blunt the effectiveness of sanctions” on Moscow.

The United States has vowed to re-evaluate ties with the oil-rich kingdom since the cut, which was seen as a diplomatic slap in the face for President Joe Biden by hiking prices on US consumers weeks before congressional elections.

Despite vowing to make the kingdom an international “pariah” following the October 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Biden travelled to Saudi Arabia in July and met with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — with the two greeting each other with a high-profile fist bump.

But with relations now strained, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said Sunday that Biden has “no plans” to meet with Prince Mohammed at an upcoming G20 summit in Indonesia.