Officially, China’s economy grew at 4.6% in the 3rd quarter, only slightly behind the 4.7% rate in the 2nd quarter. However, that growth is no distributed evenly and some parts of China are falling way behind.
Only five mainland provinces are seeing real gross domestic product growing faster this year than the whole of last year, according to Bloomberg calculations based on official figures. Of the 26 provinces that have reported third-quarter data, 11 experienced a steeper deceleration than the national slowdown.
The worst performers so far this year are Tibet, Jilin and Hainan, whose 3.2% gain is 6 percentage points lower than in 2023. Even economic powerhouses such as Zhejiang, Shanghai and Jiangsu saw GDP growth slow.
Guangdong, which made up more than 10% of the economy last year, expanded just 3.4%, the weakest result since the pandemic and down 1.4…
