CHINA will maintain necessary support for economic recovery and implement targeted structural tax cuts and other measures to consolidate its growth momentum, the country’s top economic planner pledged yesterday.

Policies aimed at stabilizing employment and safeguarding market entities will not be trimmed, while measures to support small and micro enterprises will be fully implemented, Meng Wei, spokesperson for the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), said at a press conference yesterday.

The planner vowed to continue stepping up financial services for market entities, strengthen the market regulation of raw materials, and alleviate corporate cost pressures.

While China’s economy has extended an improving trend in the first quarter, increasing uncertainties in the global market and uneven domestic recovery still pose challenges for future development, according to Meng.

China’s economy grew 18.3 percent year on year in the first quarter of 2021, as strong domestic and foreign demand powered recovery from a low base in early 2020 when COVID-19 stalled the world’s second-largest economy.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has projected that the Chinese economy will grow by 8.4 percent in 2021, 0.3 percentage points above the January forecast, according to the IMF’s World Economic Outlook released in early April.

China’s electricity consumption, a key barometer of economic activity, soared 21.2 percent in the first quarter of 2021 as the country’s economy continued to resume growth, data from the NDRC showed yesterday.

Specifically, power use in the primary and secondary industries respectively surged 26.4 percent and 24.1 percent year on year, and power use in the tertiary industry jumped 28.2 percent from a year ago, according to the commission.

The NDRC also said that it approved 16 fixed-asset investment (FAI) projects in the first quarter, with combined investment totaling 45.4 billion yuan (US$6.96 billion).

The projects were mainly in the transport, energy and high-tech industries, according to the NDRC.

China’s FAI posted a strong rebound in the first quarter of 2021 with continued improvement in investment structure.

The FAI went up 25.6 percent year on year to 9.6 trillion yuan in the first three months, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

The double-digit growth was largely driven by a low base of comparison early last year when COVID-19 paralyzed economic activities in China. Compared with the 2019 level, FAI growth came in at 6 percent. (SD-Xinhua)