Shanghai has ditched its official economic growth target for 2015, becoming the first major city or province in China to abandon such metrics as government policy shifts towards a focus on growth quality over quantity.
The move signifies both a nationwide move to switch focus from hitting annual targets with some of the fastest growth rates in the world - now that those rates are waning - as well as a more local effort to de-link growth from promotions.
Growth in gross domestic product has long been a key metric to evaluate the performance of local officials, helping to determine whether they were promoted. But President Xi Jinping last year that “we can no longer simply use GDP growth rates to decide who the [party] heroes are.”