Congratulations to Beijing. China hit its growth goal for 2023 despite Xi Jinping’s best efforts to smother the economy with overwrought, misplaced paternalism.

Growth was 5.2% for the full year, the NBS said Wednesday. There was no drama. Premier Li Qiang pre-announced the headline annual growth figure in Davos on Tuesday.

In Q4, the economy likewise expanded 5.2%. That was easily better than the mark to hit for the full-year number to reach the target.

By now, everyone knows the narrative: The Chinese economy struggled in 2023, a year that should’ve been defined by a robust expansion following the lifting of COVID curbs. Instead, domestic demand was tepid, producer prices remained mired in deflation and consumer prices ended the year with three straight monthly declines, the longest stretch of CPI deflation since 2009.

The legacy of Xi’s property crackdown casts a long shadow, and efforts to revive the housing market haven’t met with much success. The Party’s prioritizing “industrial innovation” in 2024 over consumption as Beijing looks inward to overcome restrictions imposed by the The White House, where the Biden administration is keen to curtail Xi’s access to advanced technology with the potential to be diverted to military applications.

At times, Beijing appears short on good ideas for reviving the economy. That’s not lost on the market. In the latest installment of BofA’s Global Fund Manager survey, investors expected a weaker Chinese economy for the first time in 21 months.

“China growth expectations slumped back to ‘lockdown lows’ and turned negative for the first time since May of 2022,” the bank’s Michael Hartnett said Tuesday.

The PBoC eschewed an MLF cut earlier this week despite (or perhaps because of) subdued credit creation, and absent big-ticket fiscal stimulus, it isn’t obvious what steps the Party can take to engineer the kind of recovery markets expected to play out beginning this time last year.

Activity data for December, released concurrent with the GDP figures, was mixed, at best. Retail sales rose 7.4% YoY, well below the 8% economists expected.

Industrial output managed a 6.8% increase, slightly better than forecasts.

Fixed asset investment rose 3% for the year. The surveyed jobless rate ticked higher to 5.1% in December.

I doubt there’s much utility in parsing the release much further. The headwinds which bedeviled the world’s second-largest economy last year haven’t abated. And the geopolitical environment may be even more contentious going forward given the election results in Taiwan.