BEIJING — As 2026 marks the beginning of China's 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-30), the country's economic outlook is attracting global attention. The Government Work Report submitted on March 5 to the National People's Congress set the 2026 growth target at 4.5-5 percent, signaling steady confidence in China's development trajectory.

Overseas observers view the target as both proactive and pragmatic, saying that by seeking to maintain a reasonable growth pace while emphasizing quality and structural reform, China aims to stabilize its economic fundamentals and sustain long-term momentum.

Setting a growth target requires balancing various factors. Against the backdrop of a turbulent external environment, keeping the economy operating within a reasonable range not only provides a buffer against uncertainty, but also creates favorable conditions for deepening structural reforms and accelerating the shift to new growth drivers.

This year's growth target reflects China's policy approach of pursuing effective improvements in quality and reasonable expansion in quantity, said Raquel Leon de la Rosa, an expert on China with the Meritorious Autonomous University of Puebla, Mexico.

China has accumulated rich experience in development planning, building a relatively systematic policy toolkit and risk-response mechanisms in economic governance that can help maintain growth stability and resilience amid global uncertainties, she said.

In comparison with global peers, the weight behind China's growth target becomes more evident. In January, the International Monetary Fund projected global economic growth at 3.3 percent in 2026, with advanced economies expanding by 1.8 percent.

China's growth target would place its economic performance above the global average and make an important contribution to global economic stability and development, Selcuk Colakoglu, director of the Ankara-based Turkish Center for Asia-Pacific Studies, told Xinhua.

The significance of this growth target lies not in the number itself, but in the fact that it sets the tone for development over the next five years, noted Rahma Gafmi, an economics professor at Indonesia's Airlangga University.

"On the one hand, a reasonable growth rate creates a window for reform, transformation and risk mitigation," the expert said. "On the other, it places growth more clearly on the foundation of expanding domestic demand, raising total factor productivity and strengthening technological and innovation capabilities."

Overseas observers have noted that the economic growth target is not merely a quantitative indicator, but also a clear signal for the development path ahead. It helps focus efforts on high-quality development and promotes the upgrading and optimization of the economic structure.

Denis Depoux, a global managing director of German management consultancy Roland Berger, said that such an economic growth target is a necessary trade-off to achieve higher-priority objectives of economic transformation toward high-quality development, and investment can be redistributed to address the real needs, such as technology and people's livelihoods.

Pagon Gatchalee, a lecturer in the department of marketing at Chiang Mai University Business School in Thailand and a long-time observer of China's technological development, highlighted the "East Data, West Computing" initiative, a national project that channels data processing and computing tasks from China's data-intensive eastern regions to energy-rich western areas.

"It is a vivid example of developing new quality productive forces according to local conditions — cultivating high value-added industries aligned with future development directions based on the resource endowments of different regions,"Gatchalee said.

Xinhua