Drop focus on GDP targets: expert

In the coming year, China needs to give up its focus on meeting GDP targets and concentrate on quality of growth over quantity, according to the executive of an asset management company.

"In the Five Year Plan, there was already discussion of this - there was a big point that the Five Year Plan did not have a five-year GDP target," Patrick Chovanec, managing director of New York-based Silvercrest Asset Management, told China Daily at a recent conference in New York on Chinese capital markets. But China ended up having "implicit annual GDP targets, and you end up in the same place," he said

China's economic strength lies in its extremely large reserve of foreign currencies, representative of China's great buying power and can be something it draws from if it needed to further slow the country's growth, Chovanec said.

"In economic cycles, countries run trade surpluses, sometimes they run trade deficits, and they're able to finance the country's quality of life even when their earnings fall off by drawing down on their reserves," he said. "So China could do the same thing. China has produced more than it's consumed for years, it can afford to consume more than it produces."

If China's consumption were to rise, the country could fall into deficit, but that's not a bad thing, Chovanec said. "As long as it's part of a meaningful economic adjustment, as long as it's part of China getting on a more sustainable growth path, that's not a bad thing," he said.

The double-digit growth that has fueled China's economy has been gradually tapering, but the country has avoided what economists call a hard landing, where an economy drops down sharply from massive growth to almost a recession.

"China's earned it in many ways - it's earned this cushion that a lot of countries don't have, to have this economic adjustment and yet maintain quality of life," Chovanec said. "But it means a very different relationship to the global economy."

For the past three decades, China has defined economic success as running surpluses, accumulating reserves, and maximizing GDP, but Chovanec suggested that the path to sustainability is "turning those traits on their heads": running deficits, drawing down on reserves, lowering GDP.

"But that's okay, because why do you run an economy? Do you run an economy to hit GDP growth targets and accumulate endless amounts of claims on other countries? Or do you run an economy so that people have quality of life? I would argue the latter," he said.

At the beginning of this year, Chovanec spoke to the BBC about China's economic prospects for 2013 and he said China needed to embrace "real economic adjustment," even if brought pain and slower growth for the time being. While the Third Plenum produced rhetoric pointing in the "right direction," this year saw the economy going in the opposite way.