China is facing a structural growth slowdown but we are more optimistic than the consensus for the outcome in 2020. At Standard Chartered, we forecast growth of 6.1 per cent, slowing to a still-robust trend of 5.5 per cent through to the mid-2020s.
We see three key reasons to be optimistic about China in 2020: the lagged impact of the shift from deleveraging to releveraging; the boost from increased fiscal stimulus; and the likely improvement in news flow on the US-China trade war.
These supportive factors are likely to be accompanied by the bottoming out of the industrial inventory cycle, domestic producer price inflation and the global electronics cycle.