The real estate market in China is cooling, but the windows in Beijing buildings still have to cleaned.

By KEITH BRADSHER

HONG KONG - Many Chinese have been expecting a post-Olympics economic slowdown, but it started before the Games even began.
Chinese factories reported a plunge in new orders in July. Exports are barely growing. The real estate market is weakening .
China’s slowing growth is one reason that world prices for metals like copper, tin, zinc and aluminum have tumbled in the last several weeks, as voracious Chinese factories have closed, or cut back their consumption.
But while China’s difficulties may reduce inflationary pressures around the world, they threaten to slow further the already tenuous global economic growth.
“China has slowed down a lot already, but it’s going to slow down more,” said Hong Liang, the senior China economist at Goldman Sachs.
Economists expect growth to slip from its recent pace of 11 percent or more annually to as low as 9 or 9.5 percent over the coming year.
Most nations would envy that rate. But 9 percent growth will make it much harder to supply jobs to the millions of Chinese moving to cities from rural areas in search of work. And any slower growth could prove a shock to workers who have been receiving double-digit pay increases each year, as companies struggle to find enough labor to keep factories open.
How Chinese authorities manage a slower economy, and its effect on China’s 1.3 billion people, will be a test for the regime. It seems to be responding quickly.
A Politburo meeting on July 25 replaced the previous national economic goals, preventing overheating of the economy and controlling inflation, with new targets. As enunciated by President Hu Jintao in recent appearances, the objectives now are to seek fast and sustained economic growth while still trying to keep inflation manageable.
“We must maintain steady, relatively fast development and control excessive price rises as the priority tasks of macro adjustment,” he said on August 1 at a rare news conference.
Having put a series of brakes on the economy over the last five years to limit inflation, Chinese policy makers are now removing some to prevent growth from slowing too much.
For example, after letting China’s currency rise sharply against the dollar in the first half of this year, China’s central bank actually pushed it down against the dollar. This is helping to preserve the competitiveness of Chinese exporters in foreign markets, although at the risk of angering the United States and other trading partners.
Weak demand from the United States over the last year, and now from Europe as well, is part of China’s emerging problem. On one recent evening, the port here was less full of containers than usual, part of a broader slowing of export growth.
There are signs that the real estate market is weakening after years of climbing prices that had prompted warnings of a possible bubble.
Min Hwa, a real estate broker in Shenzhen, a city of at least 12 million people near Hong Kong, said that residential real estate prices dropped by 10 percent over the last year in desirable neighborhoods near the city center and fell by up to 40 percent in outlying neighborhoods.
“We have seen a lot fewer prospective buyers in recent months,” he said.
Andy Rothman, a China economist at CLSA, a Hong Kong brokerage, said that nearly half of China’s provinces had scattered power shortages this summer. But the slowing of the economy will prevent the problem from becoming widespread , he said.
Also, China’s enormous investments in transportation networks are starting to show productivity gains that could help the country weather a global economic downturn better than most.
And foreign investment is still pouring into the country, increasingly directed at higher-technology industries, although other Asian countries are also drawing more investment.