China’s consumer spending may have booked the worst start to any year outside the pandemic, highlighting the challenge to a government that has targeted a bigger role for domestic demand.
Retail sales for the first two months of the year likely rose 2.1% compared with the same period of 2025, according to the median forecast of economists surveyed by Bloomberg ahead of the official release on Monday. That would be the lowest ever reading in a data series that started in 2000, outside of January-February 2020, when the economy was reeling from the Covid shock.