WASHINGTON - China's exceptional performance in 2020 has helped the global economy in the face of the devastating COVID-19 pandemic, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

While the World Bank (WB) projected the global economy to have pulled back by 4.3 percent in 2020, China's outperformance in the same period has likely lifted the global economy as a whole by "nearly double its usual contribution," said the report, quoting Homi Kharas, a senior global economics and development fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Kharas also said that without China's contribution, the world economy would have shrunk by 5.7 percent last year versus the current figure expected by the WB, according to the report.

China's gross domestic product (GDP) exceeded the 100-trillion-yuan ($15.42 trillion) threshold in 2020, official data showed Monday.

The country, which saw its GDP increase 2.3 percent year on year to 101.5986 trillion yuan last year, is expected to be the only major economy to post growth in the pandemic-ravaged year, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).