On the sidelines of the ongoing China Development Forum 2023 held in Beijing, a senior World Bank official said that China is undergoing a robust recovery with the reopening from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Manuela V. Ferro, World Bank Vice President for East Asia and Pacific, also expressed confidence in China’s potential to achieve quality growth.

SOUNDBITE (English): MANUELA V. FERRO, World Bank Vice President for East Asia and Pacific
“I think China is undergoing a robust recovery with the reopening from the COVID pandemic. We see economic activity rebounding, especially in the services sector, which is more contact intensive. So we are pretty confident that China’s growth will be around 5 percent this year. In the last session that I was just discussing, we were talking about the medium and long-term prospects, and that’s where more work will need to come into sustained growth over the long term.

China has a tremendous track record of growth. It will need to do some significant transformation of its economy to maintain that rate of growth in the future. But it’s also focusing on growth quality. And that is also a very important element, greening its economy, tremendous amount of transformations that China is engaged in. And we have confidence that China will be able to achieve them.”

Xinhua News Agency correspondents reporting from Beijing.