March 3, Beijing - The 14th National People's Congress (NPC) will kick off its first annual session on Sunday, and the first session of the 14th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) will be convened on Saturday.

China's GDP expanded 3 percent in 2022, which is lower than the target of around 5.5 percent set for its economy last year.

Although the growth rate is lower than the target set, authorities said that achieving it "was not easy" as China faced multiple challenges last year.

Lian Ping, head of the Zhixin Investment Research Institute, predicted a growth rate of above 5 or 5.5 percent, citing the fact that China's economic growth has slowly been returning to normal as the continuous impact of the epidemic ebbs.

Amid the earlier-than-anticipated recovery, the IMF raised its forecast for China's economic growth in 2023 to 5.2 percent in January, up 0.8 percentage points from its projection in October of last year, driven by a rebound in private consumption.

Nomura Securities also expects Beijing to set this year's GDP growth target at "around 5.5 percent," which is the same as last year's and close to their forecast for the 2023 GDP growth of 5.3 percent.

China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has released economic data for the period from January to February 2023. The generally positive figures indicate that the economy has begun to recover since the lifting of zero-COVID restrictions in late 2022, but also show that there is still a significant amount of work ahead for the country to return to pre-pandemic growth levels.