Emerging industries and new products have become prominent growth drivers in China, propelling and accelerating the world's second largest economy towards high-quality development, half-yearly data showed.
China's gross domestic product (GDP) expanded 5 percent to reach 61.68 trillion yuan (8.49 trillion U.S. dollars) in the first half of 2024, according to the data released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) on Monday, indicating a positive trend of economic recovery.
Among the 41 major industrial sectors surveyed, 39 saw year-on-year growth in value added in the first half of the year, the NBS said.
In the Jan-June period, the value added by high-tech manufacturing expanded 8.7 percent year on year, underscoring the sector's solid progress. That is 2.7 percentage points faster than that of industrial enterprises above the designated size.
China's first "ground space station," the domestically developed Space Environment Simulation and Research Infrastructure (SESRI), passed its acceptance review in Harbin, the capital city of northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, in February.
China has become the first country to gather samples from the far side of the moon and bring them back to Earth in a landmark achievement for the the country's space programme.
China developed the world's first 6G field test network that integrates communications and intelligence, demonstrating that the transmission capabilities of 6G can be reached on 4G and 5G technologies.
In the first six months of 2024, the production and sales of new energy vehicles in China went up more than 30 percent year on year, driving the NEV industry chain to maintain rapid growth.
The value added of aerospace vehicle and equipment manufacturing climbed 10 percent year on year while the output of major digital products such as integrated circuits, service robots, LCD screens, and smart phones and watches maintained a double-digit growth rate.
From January to June this year, the export value of China's automobiles, ships, and integrated circuits increased 22.2 percent, 91.1 percent and 25.6 percent year on year respectively.
China exported 7.14 trillion yuan of mechanical and electrical products, up 8.2 percent year on year, whose value accounted for 58.9 percent of the nation's overall export value during the period. "A majority of new drivers come from new quality productive forces, which are vital for promoting high-quality development and play a role in propelling and accelerating the country's economic recovery. Fostering and building up new quality productive forces have effectively upgraded and appropriately expanded China's economic output, providing a solid support for the current economic recovery and a strong driving force for the sustained and long-term development of the economy," said Tu Shengwei, a researcher at the Academy of Macroeconomic Research under the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China's top economic planner.
Now, there are 463,000 high-tech enterprises in China and the installed capacity of industrial robots accounts for over 50 percent of the global total, with industrial internet covering major industrial categories.
By the end of June, China had cumulatively cultivated over 140,000 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that use special and sophisticated technologies to produce novel and unique products and among them 12,000 have been qualified as "little giant" enterprises.
The value added of core industries in the digital economy reached 10 percent of China's total GDP in 2023 with new business forms and models thriving.
Rising new quality productive forces drive China's growth
