And even though Goldman Sachs last Tuesday cut its forecast for economic growth in China during the second quarter to 8 percent — down from 8.8 percent — it predicted that growth would recover to 9.3 percent by the fourth quarter.

The optimists note that the Chinese economy expanded robustly until this spring, even though policy makers had been stomping on the brakes since October to try to curb inflation. Seen from that perspective, policy makers can easily press the growth accelerator, after inflation starts to subside.

The braking measures have included the requirement that commercial banks, to restrict their ability to lend, must park more than one-fifth of their assets at the central bank. That is starving all but the largest and most politically connected companies of capital.

And trying to slow a real estate boom that looks more and more like a dangerous bubble, the government has also put many restrictions on issuing new mortgages. The measures include requiring higher down payments, to reduce the risk that a real estate collapse would harm the banking system, as happened in the United States.

Another slowdown factor: the huge government investments in high-speed rail and other infrastructure, which played a central role in China’s swift recovery in 2009 from the global economic downturn, have begun to level off.

But Douglas Hsu, the chairman and chief executive of the Far Eastern Group, a big Taiwanese multinational with extensive investments in the cement and petrochemicals industries in mainland China, predicted that government-supported efforts to increase construction of low-income housing and move more people from rural areas to cities would offset the gradual deceleration in infrastructure spending in the months and years to come.

The big question now is how much economic growth may slow, before the authorities shift their priority from controlling inflation to revving the growth engine.