Local residents of Hani ethnic group attend a parade during a cultural tourism festival in Luchun County of Honghe Hani and Yi Autonomous Prefecture, southwest China's Yunnan Province, Nov. 19, 2023. The long street banquet, a time-honoured tradition of Hani ethnic group in China, was held here during a cultural tourism festival on Sunday. (Photo: Xinhua)

The Chinese economy is expected to be on the upswing in 2024, with much stronger momentum than this year, economists said on Wednesday amid a wave of global institutions raising their GDP forecasts for China.

"Next year is likely to be an important adjustment year for China's economy. It is expected that great efforts will be made to stabilize and maintain growth, as well as to remove risks. Therefore, economic growth will see stronger momentum," Li Daokui, director of the Academic Center for Chinese Economic Practice and Thinking at Tsinghua University, said at the Caijing Annual Conference 2024.

Although the IMF's latest GDP forecasts for China stand at 5.3 percent in 2023 and about 5 percent in 2024, the momentum of economic operations next year will be much higher than this year, Li said.

That's because the 2023 figure will be a recovery from a low base, while the rate next year of about 5 percent, though statistically slower, will show stronger vitality, according to Li.

In global terms, there may be a"segmentation" into three blocs: the North American and Latin American economic bloc with the US economy as the core; the European bloc with Germany as the core, and the Southeast Asian bloc with China as the core, and the economic cycles of the three sectors will be asynchronous, Li noted.

Given this backdrop, Chinese governments and enterprises need to find ways to prevent "hard decoupling" among sectors, and strive to expand the scale of China's own bloc while making more friends. It is necessary for China to strengthen the construction of the international financial infrastructure and expand its national debt market, according to Li.

China's economy has shown some recovery this year, but it hasn't been strong enough. As an array of policies to stabilize economic growth is taking effect, the nation's economy is expected to see a relatively strong recovery in 2024, Yang Delong, chief economist at Shenzhen-based First Seafront Fund Management Co, told the Global Times on Wednesday.

More forceful support policies are expected to be put in place next year to defuse risks in the property market and local government debt, and boost investment and consumption growth, Yang said.

As the latest effort to boost the nation's economic recovery, China approved an additional issuance of 1 trillion yuan ($139.3 billion) in government bonds in the fourth quarter, which could expand effective demand and help get economic growth off to a good start in 2024, experts said.

The GDP target may be set at above 5 percent next year, Ming Ming, chief economist at CITIC Securities, said at the firm's capital market annual meeting on Wednesday.

Fixed-asset investment is expected to grow significantly and become an important driver for growth, Ming noted.

On the consumer side, people's willingness to spend will steadily increase and price factors will see easing constraints. This will lead to the continuation of the trend of an overall consumption recovery, Ming said.

Among financial institutions that have recently upgraded their GDP forecasts for China, HSBC raised the 2023 outlook from 4.9 percent to 5.2 percent, and that of 2024 from 4.6 percent to 4.9 percent.