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Brave old world

Simon Cox emerging markets editor, The Economist, HONG KONG

For China’s economy, 2021 will seem strangely familiar

Things are picking up

2021 in brief

Several major new buildings open in Shanghai: a new Astronomy Museum, with the
world’s largest planetarium; the modernist Shanghai Library East, hosting 6,000
reading seats and 4.8m books; and Pudong Football Stadium, the first in China to be
designed to FIFA standards, with a capacity of 34,000

CHINA’S ECONOMY will be about as big in 2021 as everyone in 2019 expected

it would be. Let that claim sink in for a moment. It amounts to saying that

China’s economic output will be as voluminous as it would have been had the

coronavirus pandemic never happened. That is not even an especially bold

prediction. It is only a little above the consensus. It is no less impressive for

that.

Everyone expects China’s growth in 2021 to be unusually fast. A rate of 8% would
surprise no one. Some reputable economists think it could top 9%. This brief return to