Shanghai Daily news

China's economic growth slowed in the third quarter, as government control on lending and investment took effect.
The country's gross domestic product grew by 9.1 percent in the third quarter, compared with 9.6 percent in the second quarter, the National Bureau of Statistics reported yesterday.
In the first three quarters, the national economy expanded 9.5 percent to 9,314.4 billion yuan (US$1,122 billion).
Zheng jingping, a National Bureau of Statistics spokesman, said the government control had curbed over-heated investment and would help the country achieve stable growth.
"The government needs to tighten its macro-controls and pay attention to improving farmers' income and solving shortages in energy supply," Zheng said at a State Council news conference yesterday in Beijing. "That will guarantee healthy and stable economic growth."
He said over-heated investment still existed in some industries and caused a shortage of energy and raw materials and continual price rise.
Due to large domestic demand, the prices of fuel, energy and raw materials grew rapidly in the first three quarters. The prices rose 10.8 percent.
Fixed-asset investment, which accounts for about half of the nation's GDP, increased 27.7 percent in the period ending September 30.
Yi xianrong, a Chinese Academy of Social Sciences economist, said the red-hot property market was the root of the investment craze in the raw material industries.
"Fast growth in property development and investment will make it difficult to curb investment in the raw material industries such as steel and cement," Yi said.
Property prices rose 13.5 percent from a year earlier in the first eight months of this year, the fastest since 1996, the statistics bureau said last month.
In the first three quarters, China's consumer price index, the inflation gauge, rose 4.1 percent from the same period last year. In September, the index increased 5.2 percent, slightly slower than the 5.3 percent recorded in August.
Rising income helped stoke consumer spending. Per capita disposable income in urban areas, home to a third of the nation's 1.3 billion people, rose 7 percent to 7,072 yuan in the first nine months and rural incomes gained 11 percent to 2,110 yuan.
Retail sales increased 14 percent in September.
Yi noted high-flying consumer prices put pressure on the central bank to raise interest rates.
Industrial production grew 17 percent in the first nine months of the year from the same period of 2003, the government said. The gain compared with a 17.1 percent increase for the first eight months of the year.
China's passenger car production dropped in September for the first time since the country joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, declining 7.8 percent from a year earlier, the statistics bureau said.
For the whole year, Jonathan Anderson, UBS's chief Asian economist in Hong Kong, said China's economy was expected to expand by 9.9 percent in 2004.
"The economy is unlikely to see a hard landing. The growth rate will probably slow to 8.2 percent in 2005," the economist predicted.