Sharjah24 - AFP: Following the twin crises of the pandemic and the housing crisis, economists predicted that China's economic growth for 2022 would be among the weakest in the past forty years.

Ten experts interviewed forecast an average 2.7 percent year-on-year rise in gross domestic product (GDP) for the world's second-largest economy, a sharp plunge from China's 2021 growth of more than 8 percent.

It could also be China's slowest pace since a 1.6 contraction in 1976 -- the year Mao Zedong died -- and excluding 2020, after the Covid-19 virus emerged in Wuhan in late 2019.

Beijing had set itself a growth target of around 5.5 percent for 2022 but this was undermined by the government's "zero-Covid" policy, which put the brakes on manufacturing activity and consumption.

Strict lockdowns, quarantines and compulsory mass testing prompted abrupt closures of manufacturing facilities and businesses in major hubs -- like Zhengzhou, home of the world's biggest iPhone factory -- and sent reverberations across the global supply chain.

Beijing abruptly loosened pandemic restrictions in early December after three years of enforcing some of the harshest Covid measures in the world.