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China should not issue new economic tightening measures, a top statistical bureau official said, underscoring views that growth in the world’s seventh-largest economy may be slowing.

“We should stabilize macroeconomic control policies and should not issue new tightening measures in the near term,” Qiu Xiaohua, deputy director of the National Bureau of Statistics, said in a report to the National People’s Congress.

Qiu said the economy in the six months to June was stable and major indicators were nearing government targets.

China’s economy grew 9.4 percent in the first three months of the year, but with second-quarter figures due in next week, some analysts are expecting a mild slowdown.

Data on industrial output and inflation point to a cooling economy and many economists expect growth to slow to less than 9 percent for the full year.

As such the government has been facing growing calls to relax its package of monetary and administrative measures introduced piecemeal over the past two years to cool economic overheating.

Others argued that the Chinese economy was still at risk of expanding too fast, with continuing over-investment in sectors such as construction, steel and property.

But despite his upbeat report, Qiu also highlighted concerns about the imbalance in international payments, a surging trade surplus, the increasing difficulty faced by companies in daily operations and a general slowdown in global economic development.

China generated a trade surplus of US$39.65 billion for the first half of the year, driven by the country’s surging exports and government restraints on investment that have been slowing imports.