China gears up for Two Sessions, to increase fiscal deficit

China is expected to acknowledge a significant softening in domestic demand next week, while revealing highly anticipated details on fiscal stimulus aimed at shoring up growth in the face of heightened U.S. trade tensions.

The country’s annual parliamentary gathering, known as the “Two Sessions,” starts on Tuesday with the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference — a top advisory body — followed by the meeting of its legislature, the National People’s Congress.

The gathering has lasted for about a week in recent years and is typically followed by a press conference with the foreign minister and heads of economic departments.

At the opening meeting of the NPC on Wednesday, Beijing is expected to revise down its annual consumer price inflation target to around 2% — the lowest in more than two decades — from 3% or higher in prior years, according to the Asia Society Policy Institute.

That marks an implicit recognition of modest domestic demand.

The new inflation goal would act more as a ceiling than a target to be realized. China has been under deflationary pressure with nominal GDP growing slower than real GDP for the seventh straight quarter in the final quarter of 2024, Larry Hu, chief China economist at Macquarie, said in a note. Consumer prices climbed just 0.2% in 2024 and 2023, while producer prices have declined for over two years.

“Our thesis for this year is that deflation will be persistent,” Robin Xing, chief China economist at Morgan Stanley, told CNBC earlier this month. “China will try some new approach but … they will just try with small steps.”

Beijing is unlikely to significantly boost stimulus until the second half of the year, when societal unhappiness with the economic slowdown likely becomes more widespread, Xing said. He noted how the September stimulus announcements came more than a year after deflationary trends first emerged.

Investors have closely watched Beijing’s efforts to address the country’s economic slowdown after an unexpected, high-level pledge of support in September prompted a stock rally. Market gains picked up again after Chinese President Xi Jinping held a rare meeting last week with entrepreneurs including Alibaba’s Jack Ma and DeepSeek’s Liang Wenfeng.

Beijing on Wednesday will likely peg its budget deficit at 4% of GDP, up from 3% in 2024, Macquarie’s Hu said, echoing general market expectations.

That would mark a “meaningful shift as policymakers have been reluctant to breach the 3% [deficit] threshold for many years,” Hu said.

He also expects China to triple the quota for special sovereign bond sales to 3 trillion yuan ($410 billion) this year, from 1 trillion yuan in 2024, and increase the year’s quota for special local government bond issuance to 4.5 trillion yuan from 3.9 trillion yuan previously.

China on Wednesday is also widely expected to set the year’s GDP growth target at “around 5%,” the same as the last two years. That would be consistent with Xi’s previously announced goal of roughly doubling the economy’s size from 2020 levels by 2035.

But analysts caution that Beijing won’t likely go all out on stimulus given the uncertainty around trade tensions with the U.S. On top of continued tech restrictions, U.S. President Donald Trump has raised tariffs on Chinese goods by 10%, and more duties could come as soon as April 2.

That would cut into exports, a rare bright spot in China’s economy.

“March is too early for any major policy stimulus, as policymakers need more time to see the actual impact of the trade war 2.0.,” Macquarie’s Hu said. “Their track record suggests that they can’t miss the GDP growth target, but they also don’t want to over-deliver. At this point, they will keep their cards close to the chest.”

The high-profile meetings in Beijing would coincide with Trump’s speech at a joint session of Congress on March 4, where the U.S. president may go over his agenda and goals for the year.

While the world’s second-largest economy grew by 5% in 2024, retail sales growth fell sharply to 3.4% from 7.1% in 2023. The real estate drag persisted, with investments in the sector dropping by 10.6% last year, from the a year earlier.

“We think the government is likely to prioritize ‘boosting consumption’ as the top policy task in the NPC meeting,” Tao Wang, chief China economist at UBS Investment Bank, said in a note.

China has sought to boost consumption using trade-in subsidies to encourage purchases of select goods. Authorities in January expanded the trade-in program to include smartphones and more home appliances, with details on the size of subsidy support due out at the Two Sessions.

With a larger budget deficit, Beijing could more than double the size of the consumer trade-in program from last year to over 300 billion yuan in subsidies, UBS’ Wang said.

She also expects the government to address concerns about income by subsidizing families with young children, increasing pension payouts and raising the state’s contribution to its insurance program for Chinese residents.

At the upcoming meeting, China is also expected to release its spending plans for defense and technological development for the year ahead.

Beijing is due this fall to begin formalizing its priorities for the next half decade of development, known as “five-year plans.” The current one ends this year.

In China’s Communist Party-dominated system, the Two Sessions have not been the traditional venue for sharp policy shifts. Instead, direction-setting typically occurs at higher-level party meetings, such as the Third Plenum, last held in July 2024.

Xi’s meeting with entrepreneurs last week, and new policies to support the private sector and foreign investment mark the first batch of changes made in the wake of the Third Plenum, said Markus Herrmann Chen, co-founder and managing director of China Macro Group. “Symbolically, this marks a quick and good start of progressing the reforms and releases a signal that reforms are in Beijing’s pipelines,” he said.

In a proposed addition to the law, China would prohibit ad-hoc collection of fines from businesses, state media said this week.

In a sign of how businesses have struggled with a range of fee extractions, public filings last year revealed cash-strapped local governments have asked companies to pay back taxes on operations as far back as 1994.

The new law would go a long way toward giving businesses “stable legal expectations,” said Bruce Pang, adjunct associate professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong business school. At the parliamentary meeting, he also expects new measures focused on increasing investment opportunities for non-state-owned enterprises, and helping small-tech companies obtain financing more easily.

Many analysts saw the presence of tech entrepreneurs at last week’s meeting with Xi as a strong signal that a regulatory crackdown on the internet companies was officially over.

That shows going forward, “the state is willing to show regulatory leniency to technology firms, sparing them major crackdowns, in exchange for their investment in innovations in critical technologies,” said Chim Lee, senior analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit.

China’s anti-corruption probe of government officials and executives at state-owned companies for illicit behavior is still ongoing, however. More than 40 people have been removed, mostly on corruption allegations, as National People’s Congress delegates since the current term began in 2023, according to CNBC calculations of official figures.