Beijing: China’s top leaders have pledged to spend more to steady its free-falling property sector as alarm grows at the country’s flagging economy, as Treasurer Jim Chalmers arrives in Beijing for talks on how it will impact Australia. Chalmers’s arrival in Beijing on Thursday for two days of meetings, the first visit by an Australian treasurer in seven years, coincided with a flurry of economic activity in China. Residents walk by a luxury housing construction site in Beijing.
Credit: AP Chinese President Xi Jinping chaired a meeting of the Politburo on Thursday, the country’s highest decision-making body, which vowed to complete the country’s annual economic goals, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. China will also push for the real estate market “to stop declining,” in what appeared to be the most forceful vow yet to try and stabilise the property market, raising expectations of further stimulus measures which have so far been piecemeal. The Politburo said the government will strictly control adding more new-home projects and improve outstanding ones, as part of efforts to ease residential oversupply.
No specifics were offered on the size of fiscal spending, with agencies likely to fill out the details in the coming days and weeks. Chalmers has repeatedly stressed that Australia is “not immune” from weakness in the Chinese economy and last month flagged the prospect of $3 billion being wiped from federal coffers if the price of iron ore plummeted .