But a growing number of Chinese economic indicators are flashing warnings nonetheless. Thousands of Hong Kong-owned factories have closed in southern China this year as Chinese labor costs have risen, the Chinese currency has gradually appreciated against the dollar and export orders have slackened.

Despite signs of an export slowdown, many economists say China’s currency, the renminbi, is still artificially low compared with the dollar. That, they say, is a result of Beijing’s long-standing policy of buying dollars in international currency markets to depress the renminbi and keep the nation’s exports cheap.

The move that the central bank announced Wednesday would make it more difficult for China to maintain that policy. That is because the central bank, the People’s Bank of China, makes its dollar purchases with the money it forces the commercial banks to keep on reserve. By reducing those reserve requirements, the People’s Bank will have less money to spend on currency intervention.

But economists said they saw signs in the last month that the People’s Bank had less need to limit the renminbi’s value, anyway. Speculation in the currency by foreign investors — one factor that could force it higher — has been dissipating as investors find more pressing uses for their money.

Until recently, much of the slowdown in the Chinese economy was deliberately engineered by the government to slow inflation. Government officials have been particularly blunt about their willingness to see housing prices decline somewhat, to make homes affordable to more of the nation’s 1.3 billion people.

One question now is whether the government’s tight credit policy damaged buyers’ confidence in the real estate market and in the overall economy so much that it will be difficult to reverse course effectively. Another question is whether the government now risks a resurgence of inflation by relaxing its banks’ lending constraints. It was a flurry of loans in 2009 and 2010, as Beijing sought to buffer China from the post-Lehman Brothers financial crisis, that helped set off inflation.

According to official data, inflation in consumer prices has started to slow, down to 5.5 percent in October from a peak of 6.5 percent in July. But private economists say that the true rate of consumer inflation may be twice as high because of shortcomings in the official data gathering.