Although data suggests China's economic growth in 2015 met the government's target of "around 7%", there was concern from many fund managers that a slowdown is happening faster than expected.
"We had not expected the effects of stimulus to fade quite so soon," said Craig Botham, emerging markets economist at Schroders, in a statement, who predicts growth to fall to about 6.5% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2016.
Much of the media attention on China focused on its 2015 growth figure being the lowest for 25 years, however, some fund managers said the headlines painted a misleading picture.
"Listening to the news of late, you would think China is in financial meltdown. This simply isn't the case – growth is slowing down but the country is not heading for financial collapse," said Salman Ahmed, global strategist at Lombard Odier.
David Riley, head of credit strategy at BlueBay Asset Management echoed this optimistic view, noting that China's large foreign exchange reserves will buy the country time.
"China has the capacity to engineer an orderly deleveraging of its heavily indebted corporate sector without a financial crisis and even harder-landing for the economy," he said.
Some fund managers were striking a bullish tone despite the widespread gloom.
"Although market volatility and the weakness of the renminbi might have somehow impacted the sales growth in luxurious goods areas (e.g. gold and jewellery), the overall consumption in China has held up pretty well," said Raymond Ma, portfolio manager of the Fidelity China Consumer fund.
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