The National Day holiday served as an important window for observing cultural and tourism consumption. Travelers visited historic cities to connect with centuries of cultural heritage and followed red tourism routes to trace the footsteps of earlier generations. Over the seven-day break, people experienced both poetry and distant horizons through their travels, coming together to form a vibrant picture of consumption.
Since the start of this year, China's consumption has shown a feature of slowing scale expansion. Has China's consumption growth actually slowed down? Is there still room to tap potential? To understand the Chinese market comprehensively, objectively, and dialectically, one must note that China's consumption today is at a critical stage of upgrading from subsistence-oriented to development-oriented and quality-oriented patterns. The consumption structure is rapidly reshaping, service consumption is expanding quickly, and new forms of consumption are flourishing. In this process, it is necessary both to address the pressure brought by the shift in growth drivers and to recognize the potential released by structural optimization.
From the perspective of scale, the pace of consumption expansion has somewhat slowed, but the incremental volume remains considerable. In the first eight months of this year, consumption growth was lower than in the same period last year, due to both the diminishing marginal effects of the trade-in policy for consumer goods and factors such as fluctuations in the international energy market, which are mostly short-term influences. More importantly, in the first eight months of this year, total retail sales of consumer goods approached 33 trillion yuan, an increase of more than 360 billion yuan over the same period last year. The consumer market is still steadily expanding, and market resilience remains strong.
From the perspective of structure, consumption upgrading is accelerating, with the share of service consumption and quality consumption rising. In recent years, China's consumer market has shown new trends such as quality-oriented goods consumption, service-oriented consumption structure, and networked consumption methods. Service consumption has risen prominently, becoming a vivid reflection of consumption structure upgrading. In the first eight months, service retail sales grew 4.9% year on year, faster than overall market sales growth, and the share of service consumption has continued to rise. At the same time, livestreaming e-commerce and instant retail are developing rapidly, becoming important forces for innovating consumption formats and models and activating consumption potential.
From the perspective of trends, new consumption growth points are constantly emerging, and the potential for boosting consumption is enormous. Take the field of artificial intelligence as an example. At present, smart wearables and intelligent connected vehicles continue to gain popularity among consumers. This year, China's smart home market size is expected to exceed 800 billion yuan, with shipments expected to surpass 300 million units.
At the same time, it should be noted that boosting consumption still faces many challenges. Consumption is a function of income and wealth, and consumption growth is also affected by social expectations. To boost consumption, coordinated efforts are needed across multiple dimensions, including raising household income, increasing policy support, and creating a favorable environment.
Increase household income so that residents can consume. Accelerating the formulation and implementation of plans to raise urban and rural residents' incomes, and introducing a set of pragmatic measures in areas such as increasing income for low-income groups, raising residents' property income, and improving compensation and social security systems, will help enhance residents' consumption capacity.
Stabilize consumption expectations so that residents dare to consume. Optimizing the structure of fiscal expenditure, increasing the proportion of public service expenditure in fiscal expenditure, and achieving a close integration of investment in physical goods and investment in people can reduce residents' worries about education, medical care, and elderly care.
Increase policy support so that residents are willing to consume. It is necessary to make full and good use of the 10 billion yuan special fund for fiscal and financial coordination to boost domestic demand, implement interest subsidy policies for personal consumer loans and loans to service industry business entities, and better meet the people's aspirations for a better life with a sound consumption environment.
Expanding domestic demand focuses on expanding consumption. Promoting consumption structure upgrading while expanding scale can both lay a solid domestic demand foundation for stabilizing the overall macroeconomic picture and translate the fruits of economic development into a tangible sense of gain, happiness, and security for ordinary people.
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