OREANDA-NEWS. October 30, 2012. China has never lacked for growth over the past decade but it has suffered from the wrong kind of growth, developing a dangerous reliance on investment.Tucked into its latest economic data was evidence that the country has finally started to address this problem, reports Shanghai Securities News.

Consumption clearly surpassed investment as China’s biggest growth engine, reinforcing a trend that emerged earlier this year – and something that has rarely happened over the past decade. "It seems that the necessary rebalancing towards household consumption has begun in earnest," said Yao Wei, an economist with Societe Generale.

But it is too early to give China a clean bill of health. The economy’s strong performance at the end of the third quarter was in fact fuelled by a jump in investment, illustrating that consumption is still far from strong enough to power growth on its own.