BEIJING — China’s economic growth with fluctuations in a narrow range in the past four years shows the economy’s “great stability and resilience”, an official has said.

In the past 16 consecutive quarters, China’s GDP growth stayed in a range of 6.4 percent to 7 percent. “This kind of moderate fluctuation has not been easy,” Sheng Laiyun, deputy head of the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), said in an interview with Economic Daily.

“Theoretically speaking, China’s economy succeeded in shifting gear from the previous high speed to current medium-high rate after the past eight years, with the growth approaching a lower potential rate,” Sheng was quoted as saying in the interview carried in the newspaper on Feb 27.

As China managed to turn the service sector and consumption its main growth drivers, its economy has shown notably higher stability and sustainability. “This is the natural result from economic restructuring and upgrading,” he said.

In 2018, the service sector’s value added accounted for 52.2 percent of the GDP, and the sector’s growth contributed 59.7 percent to the country’s economic growth.

The contribution of final consumption expenditure to economic growth rose to 76.2 percent, up 18.6 percentage points from the previous year, NBS data showed.

At the same time, China’s economic growth was in line with other major economic indicators in the same period, according to Sheng.

“Without economic growth of more than 6 percent, annual job creation would not have exceeded 13 million,” Sheng said.

Last year, the country’s GDP growth was 6.6 percent, power consumption expanded 8.2 percent, railway freight volume rose 9.1 percent, and 13.61 million jobs were created, the NBS data showed.