Costumers select goods at a tax-free shop in Sanya, South China’s Hainan province, on Oct 5, 2020. (File photo: Xinhua)

With effective measures taken against the COVID-19 pandemic, China seems to have shaken off the impact of the virus andmany foreign observers gave optimistic, even bold, 2021 projections on the world’s second largest economy.

The World Economic Outlook released in October by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), forecasted that Chinawouldcontinue to be the only economy in the world to show positive growth in 2020 as its GDP is predicted to expand 1.9 percent this year. The faster-than-expected recovery will boost China's growth to 8.2 percent next year, according to the outlook.

IMF Chief Economist Gita Gopinath said China was pulling up the global numbers, and without China,"cumulative growth for 2020 and 2021 is negative."

The Economist projected that China’s economy will be about as big in 2021 as everyone in 2019 expected it would be. And there is a wide consensus that China’s growth in 2021 to be unusually fast that “a rate of 8percentwould surprise no one”.Some reputable economists think it could top 9percent, according to the British newspaper.

"China's economy in 2021 is going to be 10percentbigger than it was in 2019, and every other major economy is going to be smaller," said Nicholas Lardy, an economist with the Peterson Institute for International Economics.“China's role in the global economy will continue to expand," Lardy predicts.

With the strict requirement for coronavirus tests for passengers coming to China, city-wide tests and regional quarantine, the pandemic in China iswell containedand total coronavirus deaths stayed at 4,634 for a long time.

The effective pandemic controlhas set up the foundation for China to rebound more quickly. Chinese people are confident enough the virus has been vanquished to go shop, dine and spend with gusto. Likewise, the business, the manufacturing sector can operate like it before the pandemic broke out.

The strong domestic demand is also propelling China’s economic figures soaring. In this year, China unveiled the dual-circulation development plan, which will fully develop the advantages of the country's super-large market and the potential for domestic demand to establish a new development pattern featuring domestic and international dual circulations that complement each other.

Based on the objective development of the Chinese economy, which has seen industrial upgrading and an expansion of the domestic market, the new development pattern takes the domestic market as the mainstay and allows domestic and foreign markets to boost each other.

"Newly emerging industries driven by technological innovation, together with robust domestic demand and recovering exports, will inject more impetus into the economy next year," Cao Heping, an economist at Peking University,told Global Times.

(Compiled by Qiao Wai)