"According to preliminary estimates, China's GDP for the first three quarters of 2021 amounted to 82.313 trillion yuan ($12.8 trillion), an increase of 9.8% in annual terms", NBS said.
In the third quarter of this year, China's GDP increased by 4.9 percent year-on-year, which was in line with earlier estimates.
Retail sales of consumer goods in China rose 16.4 percent in the first three quarters of 2021, to 31.805 trillion yuan ($4.94 trillion). Online retail sales for the reporting period grew 18.5 percent compared to January-September 2020, reaching 9.187 trillion yuan ($1.4 trillion).
In the first three quarters of this year, 10.45 million new jobs were created in China, according to the statistics bureau. Urban unemployment stood at 4.9 percent in September 2021, which is 0.5 percentage points lower than in the same period last year.
Smoke is discharged from chimneys at the Waigaoqiao coal-fired power plant in Pudong, Shanghai, China
© East News / Imaginechina
The Chinese government expects an overall GDP growth of over 6 percent in 2021. In the first half of this year, the nation's GDP increased by 12.7 percent (growing 18.3 percent year-on-year in the first quarter and 7.9 percent in the second quarter).
In 2019, the Chinese economy grew 6 percent. Last year, growth slowed to 2.3 percent amid the coronavirus pandemic, which was the worst performance in 40 years.