It's not unusual for China's officials to publish papers before they move to a higher position. But no one had ever written one on the importance of consumption - until now.
Vice-Premier Li Keqiang, widely tipped to become the nation's next premier, used the pages of the latest edition of Qiushi, a theoretical journal of the Communist Party, to extol the virtues of something the party used to scorn as the epitome of bourgeois economics.
Yet his celebration of spending and shopping could not have been more timely, given that two of the three horses pulling the wagon of the mainland economy were no longer generating enough power, said He Jun, senior economist with Anbound, an independent consultancy in macroeconomics.
The first horse, foreign trade, has been seeing unstable growth since the third quarter of last year.
Demand from Europe and the United States remained weak, and the yuan's value against the dollar had risen nearly 30 per cent since 2005, He said.
In January, partly because there were fewer working days than in the same month a year earlier thanks to the Lunar New Year holiday, exports and imports declined markedly year on year. In Guangdong, the largest trading province, exports fell by 9.2 per cent year on year. Imports dropped a steep 27.2 per cent.
