Senior China Official: Trade War Could Cut GDP 1 pt

A senior official of China's ruling Communist Party said the trade dispute with the U.S. could reduce China's growth pace this year by as much as 1 percentage point, the South China Morning Post reported on Friday, citing an unnamed source.

The paper said Wang Yang, a member of the Communist Party's seven-person Standing Committee, told a delegation of Taiwanese businesspeople whose firms are based in China that the worst-case scenario from the trade war was a 1 percentage point drop in GDP growth this year.

Beijing has set a growth target of between 6% and 6.5% for 2019.

Reporting by Reuters Beijing Monitoring Desk