On February 3, 2016, Pan Gongsheng, deputy governor of the People's Bank of China and administrator of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE), met with Andrew Rashbass, chief executive of Euromoney Institutional Investor, and Tony James, president of Blackstone, in Beijing.
The current economic conditions in China should be viewed in an all-round and objective way, said Pan Gongsheng. Overall, China's economy is running in a reasonable range. Against the backdrop of the slowing world economy and global trade, and heightened fluctuations in the international financial markets, China maintained a mid-to-high growth rate of 6.9 percent in 2015, which was no easy job as China's economic aggregate had exceeded the basis point of USD 10 trillion and was relatively high compared with other countries.
Pan stressed that China's slowing economic growth is attributed to the sluggish global economic growth as well as the Chinese government's active policy adjustment, and will be conducive to China's achievement of more sustainable and higher quality growth and to global economic rebalance. Going forward, China will focus on advancing the structural reform, especially the supply-side structural reform, to better balance economic growth, structural adjustment and risk prevention to achieve sustainable and stable economic development and make great contributions to global economic growth and rebalance.
According to Pan, China's balance of payments stays stable, the cross-border capital flow risk is within control, and the RMB exchange rate remains stable against a basket of currencies, indicating there is no ground for sustainable depreciation of the RMB. While vigorously promoting trade and investment facilitation, China focuses on risk prevention, stressing the requirement of reviewing the authenticity and the level of compliance and cracking down on foreign exchange violations, and will not resort to capital controls as it did before.
They also exchanged ideas on the current global economic and financial conditions.
