The cooling down of the property........>

CHINA PRESS: The cooling down of the property market will not affect Chinese

economic growth but instead will be beneficial to the quality and efficiency of

the economy, the Securities Daily said in a front-page commentary Wednesday.

Economic data released Monday showed that property investment this year through

July grew 7.9% from the same period last year, 0.6 percentage point lower than

in the January-to-June period. It was mainly the service sector that supported

China's gross domestic product growth of 6.9% in the first half, which was 0.2

percentage point higher than that in the first half of last year. On the other

hand, the property sector contributed 6.2% to economic growth, while the

proportion in the same period last year was 8.2%. It shows that a reasonable

cooling of the property market will not drag down the speed of economic growth,

the newspaper argued. Chinese GDP will grow smoothly while maintaining

stability, and even a slowdown of 0.1 to 0.2 percentage point would be, in fact

"a reasonable and normal fluctuation," it said. (Securities Daily)