At a press conference held by the State Council Information Office on July 15, Mao Shengyong, deputy head of the National Bureau of Statistics, summed up China’s economic performance in the first half of 2026 with four keywords: “steadiness,” “resilience,” “new momentum” and “high quality.”

China’s GDP grew 4.7% year-on-year, with the increase in output reaching its highest level for the first half of the year in nearly five years—evidence of “steadiness.” Despite slowing global trade, China’s total imports and exports expanded to 25.5 trillion yuan (approximately $3.8 trillion), while energy and food security remained on a solid footing, demonstrating “resilience.” The value added of high-tech manufacturing rose 13.3%, with new growth drivers contributing more than 40% of economic growth, reflecting “new momentum.” Meanwhile, manufacturing’s share of GDP rebounded to 26.2%, while energy consumption per unit of GDP fell 1.9%, indicating continued progress in “high-quality development.” To assess what these headline figures reveal about the underlying trajectory of China’s economy at the outset of the 15th Five-Year Plan period (2026–30), CSST recently spoke with several scholars.

“China’s economic growth engines are shifting, and this transformation has become tangible and observable,” said Chen Shiyi, director of the Institute of Insurance Application and Innovation at Fudan University. In the first six months of 2026, the value added of high-tech manufacturing enterprises above the designated size surged 13.3% year-on-year, while aerospace equipment manufacturing and electronic and communications equipment manufacturing grew 16.3% and 17%, respectively.

What matters most is not merely the growth figures, but the structural shift underpinning expansion, Chen emphasized. Over the same period, China’s integrated circuit output climbed 23.1%, production of 3D printing equipment rose 48.5%, and industrial robot output grew 28%. Pointing to these figures, Chen observed, “this signals that artificial intelligence (AI) has moved beyond conceptual frameworks to industrial practice, achieving large-scale deployment on production lines.”

Fang Ying, vice president of Xiamen University, characterized the first half’s progress in high-quality development in terms of three directions. First, the economy is moving toward higher-end industries, as reflected in sustained growth in the value added of high-tech and digital manufacturing. Second, it is becoming greener, with clean energy developing rapidly. Third, it is advancing toward new forms of growth: Global cumulative downloads of Chinese open-source AI large models exceeded 10 billion, average daily token calls reached hundreds of trillions, AI penetration in manufacturing surpassed 30%, and half of the world’s 16 newly added “lighthouse factories” were located in China.

China’s GDP increased by 3.6 trillion yuan in the first half of 2026, the largest first-half increase in nearly five years, while energy consumption per unit of GDP fell 1.9% year-on-year. Lu Jian, a research fellow from the Yangtze Industrial Development Institute at Nanjing University, argued that higher production efficiency and lower energy consumption per unit are mutually reinforcing, helping to strengthen the competitiveness of China’s manufacturing sector.

Driven by new quality productive forces, the value added of high-tech manufacturing grew 13.3% in the first half of 2026. Wu Weixing, president of the Capital University of Economics and Business, identified three main ways in which new quality productive forces are influencing the current economic cycle: dampening cyclical volatility, reshaping the mechanisms through which economic cycles are transmitted, and amplifying differences in growth performance across industries and sectors.

Amid persistent geopolitical tensions and rising trade protectionism, several scholars interviewed by CSST argued that China’s economy is developing a set of distinctive advantages built around economic security, market appeal, and pathways for industrial transformation. Ye Maosheng, dean of the Department of International Economics and Trade at Hubei University, identified four core strengths. First, maintaining stable supplies and prices of strategic materials serves as a macroeconomic stabilizer. Second, overall price levels have remained moderate, while China’s large production capacity has helped cushion the economy against imported inflation, giving monetary policy greater room for independent adjustment. Third, China occupies an important and difficult-to-replace position on both the supply and demand sides of global trade. Fourth, rising profits in high-tech industries have strengthened firms’ willingness to invest, with capacity expansion increasingly shifting from policy-driven initiatives toward investment undertaken on firms’ own initiative.

China’s foreign trade recorded double-digit growth in both imports and exports in the first half of 2026, with exports rising 13.4% year-on-year and imports soaring 22.1%. The value of imports exceeded 10 trillion yuan for the first time. Fang attributed this strength in both domestic and external demand to four advantages: a comprehensive industrial system, strong innovation momentum, growing market appeal, and continued expansion of opening up. Manufacturing accounted for 26.2% of GDP in the first half of the year, 0.4 percentage points higher than three years earlier. Sun Wenkai, deputy director of the National Institute of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises at Renmin University of China, argued that the rebound indicates that China has maintained a solid manufacturing base while reducing the risk of premature deindustrialization.

Beyond these achievements, several scholars turned their attention to deeper issues likely to shape China’s medium- and long-term development, including the transition between old and new growth drivers, the recovery of domestic demand, technological substitution, and the restructuring of evaluation frameworks. These questions may ultimately constitute some of the most significant research issues raised by this mid-year economic assessment.