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BEIJING, July 30-- Doomsayers on China's economy have been wrong in the past, and they are wrong again today. China reported 6.9 percent GDP growth for the first half of 2017, exceeded the 6.7 percent rise in 2016 as well as beating the consensus of forecasters. Forecasters find it difficult to resist superimposing outcomes in major crisis-battered developed economies on China, but they overlook deeper issues shaping the China growth debate, said Stephen Roach, faculty member at Yale University. The latest bout of pessimism over the Chinese economy has focused on the twin headwinds of deleveraging and a tightening of the property market. As Roach has argued, China, with its far larger saving cushion and much smaller sovereign debt burden (49 percent of GDP), is in much better shape to avoid a sovereign debt crisis. There is always good reason to worry about the Chinese property market, but unlike those of other fully urbanized major economies, China's housing market enjoys ample support from the demand side, he noted. To stay tuned with the latest development of the Chinese economy, international financial heavyweights raised their prospects on the Chinese economy. The IMF saw China's 2017 growth at 6.7 percent, 0.1 percentage points higher than its last estimate. It shows IMF confidence in China's economic growth, considering solid first quarter underpinned by previous policy easing and supply-side reform, including efforts to reduce excess capacity in the industrial sector. | 
