New Delhi

Chinese leaders promised on Thursday to enact "necessary fiscal spending" to catch this year's economic growth target of around 5 per cent, acknowledging new challenges and lifting expectations on further stimulus apart from measures already announced this week.

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Statements included guidance to the government to buoy household consumption and stabilise the troubled real estate sector, which came in an official readout of a monthly meeting of top Communist Party officials, the Politburo. The September meeting is not typically a forum for macroeconomic discussions, which suggests increasing anxiety over slowing growth momentum.

Deflationary forces are extraordinarily strong from a sharp property market downturn and weak consumer confidence, pressures that have forced to the surface China's overdependence on exports in a time of rising tensions in global trade.

Economic data have flooded in recently, and several have missed expectations, causing economists to fear that growth was endangered, at the very least. Some think something more long-term and structural might be at play.

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"New situations and problems" demand a sense of "responsibility and urgency," state media reported, citing the Politburo meeting.

China's central bank on Tuesday announced its most aggressive monetary easing since the pandemic, flagging cuts to a broad range of interest rates and a 1 trillion yuan ($140 billion) injection into the financial system, among other steps.

Beijing is exploring infusing as much as 1 trillion yuan into its biggest state banks to increase their ability to underpin the beleaguered economy, mainly by issuing new special sovereign bonds, Bloomberg News reported on Thursday.

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Chinese real estate shares rallied more than 8 per cent, and their Hong Kong counterparts jumped 9 per cent, after the Politburo announcement, leading to broader gains in the stock market. The yuan and Chinese bond yields also rose.

The Politburo deemed the government should "promote the stabilisation of the real estate market," expand a whitelist of housing projects that can receive further financing, and revitalise idle land, according to a readout.

Officials "will respond to people's concerns, adjust home purchase restriction policies, lower existing mortgage rates and improve land, fiscal, tax and financial policies as soon as possible to push forward the new model of property development," it said.