Strong investments in rail lines and other infrastructure offset weak consumer spending and a shrinking trade surplus as the Chinese economy continued to grow in the first three months of the year, the New York Times reported. China’s National Bureau of Statistics announced on Thursday that the country’s gross domestic product grew 1.3 percent from the last three months of 2025. If that pace continues through the year, the Chinese economy will expand at an annual rate of about 5.3 percent.

The founder of China Evergrande ‌Group, the world's most indebted property developer, pleaded guilty ‌to charges including misuse of funds, fundraising fraud and illegally taking public ​deposits, a court in China's southern city of Shenzhen said, Reuters reported. The company has defaulted since 2021 on most of its $300 billion in liabilities as well as billions of dollars of wealth ‌management product payments, in ⁠troubles emblematic of China's property sector woes that have long dragged on economic growth.

A Beijing court has ordered the liquidation of Zhongzhi Enterprise Group and more than 300 related ​entities, in a major step towards resolving one ‌of China's biggest shadow banking collapses and managing systemic financial risks, Reuters reported. Creditors have until June 10 to file their claims with the ​administrator, Beijing Dacheng Law Offices, according to a ​court statement dated on Friday evening.

Chinese banks likely extended significantly more new loans in March than in February, according to a Reuters poll on Thursday, driven by improved credit demand ​and a seasonal rebound. Banks in China are expected to have issued around ​3.4 trillion yuan ($497.61 billion) in net new yuan loans last month, up ⁠sharply from the 900 billion yuan in February, based on the average estimate of 17 economists ​polled by Reuters.

Major global investment banks now expect China to keep official interest rates steady this year, scaling back earlier rate-cut calls, as the impact from the Middle East conflict appears ​limited, even as Beijing maintains a loose policy stance, Reuters reported. The receding rate cut expectations ‌also come as China holds up better than its regional peers amid the Iran war, while the broader economy has shown early signs of a rebound.

China’s unrelenting housing downturn is forcing the country’s banks to confront a thorny issue: sinking real estate values are pushing millions of mortgages underwater, increasing the risk of losses for lenders and property owners, Bloomberg News reported. Behind the scenes, Chinese bankers and officials are getting creative to contain the fallout. Several state-owned banks have approached cash-strapped borrowers and offered them payment holidays on their mortgages for as long as two years.

The energy shock caused by the war in the Middle East caught China, the world’s top buyer of oil, by surprise. But Beijing has been preparing for a crisis like this for years, the New York Times reported. China has stockpiled increasingly large amounts of oil. It has pursued renewable sources of energy like solar, wind and hydropower so aggressively that its demand for refined oil, diesel and gasoline is falling. And it has harnessed technology to reduce its reliance on the foreign-sourced raw materials that go into the massive output of its factories.

China's commerce ministry has initiated two counter-probes into U.S. ‌practices that hamper the flow of Chinese products into the United States, it said on Friday, refraining from immediate retaliation to U.S. measures announced earlier this month, Reuters reported. A trade truce between China and ​the U.S. has held since U.S. President Donald Trump met Chinese President ​Xi Jinping in October last year. Trump said earlier this week ⁠that he will visit Beijing in mid-May, as part of Washington's broader effort to ​reset relations in the Asia-Pacific region.