China’s economy beat expectations in the first quarter, growing 4.8 percent year on year, government data showed on Monday, amid mounting fears of a sharp slowdown due to Beijing’s draconian “zero-COVID” policies and the Ukraine war.
The world’s second-largest economy had been forecast to grow 4.4 percent in the January-March period, according to a Reuters poll of economists, up from 4 percent in the last quarter of 2021. Gross domestic product (GDP) rose 1.3 percent over the period on a quarter-on-quarter basis.
