The global fiscal crisis that has been going for five years now had surely caught, and affected, most global economies unprepared and debilitated. Fact is the present ongoings now in the eurozone. But not China. Regardless of the real and present danger of a potential hard landing economic scenario, China had already prepared itself to face this.

"Growth slowdown in China is clearly coming in the intermediate term, which means some time in the next five years," Barry Eichengreen, US economist and former senior policy adviser to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), said on Tuesday during the Mining Indaba conference in Cape Town, South Africa.

But compared to the other larger economies, China was more than flexible to accommodate changes to its federal policies to cushion the forthcoming economic slowdown, such as curbing the prices of its property sector and imposing stricter bank lending requirements, to name just a few.

Although any fiscal storm in the eurozone definitely has a corresponding and parallel effect to China, still, the world's second-largest economy has ample fiscal room to offset those effects.

"Chinese officials still have lots of policy instruments they could still use to respond to a growth slowdown," Mr Eichengreen said. "Even if the property bubble does burst, as looks to have been the case, we could see more measures to try and encourage bank regulation on the part of Chinese authorities."

Thus, the scenario the IMF said on Monday that China's economy could crash to 4 per cent should global fiscal conditions continue to seriously deteriorate was quite likely unimaginable and impossible.

"That would be a true downside scenario," Mr Eichengreen said.

Even Murtaza Syed and Yujuan Ma, Deputy Resident Representative and Economist in the IMF's China Office, strongly believed that China's economy will continue to remain constant and steady, "a bright spot in an unpredictable global economy."

"China will remain a beacon for global growth in the coming year, much as it has throughout this crisis. It is true that China is slowing in the face of headwinds from the world economy, but it is not heading for a hard landing. Both investment and consumption have been robust through the global cycle and, even with the drag from external demand, growth should still reach a very healthy 8¼ per cent this year. As a result, China will again contribute significantly to propping up global growth," Messrs Syed and Ma said, in a paper titled 'China and the World Economy in 2012' published by Business China.

The authors noted China's efforts to cool its property sector have been effective. Construction has so far remained healthy, backed by government's efforts to expand the supply of social housing.

"At present, there seems little reason to backpedal on the measures put in place to deflate the market. Indeed, a modest decline in prices would be welcome, giving citizens' incomes an opportunity to catch up with housing costs," they said.

China also has strong ambitions to turn its into a global reserve currency, and this is quite attainable, Mr Eichengreen said, provided China commercialises its banks and modifies its foreign policy.

"We could see Chinese officials intervene to limit the strengthening of their currency to maintain Chinese exports. And China, unlike most of us, still has fiscal space: they could use increases in government spending in a more limited way than they did in 2009 to support economic growth," Mr Eichengreen said.

On the domestic front, Messrs Syed and Ma said China needs to raise agricultural productivity, improve distribution networks and facilitate agricultural imports to reduce food inflation, as well as raise the cost of capital, provide a broader range of investment opportunities for savers, and institute a broad-based property tax to keep a housing bubble from forming.

On Monday, the IMF slashed its growth forecast for China for 2012 to 8.25 per cent from 9 per cent in September 2011, warning exports will significant drag its expansion in the next two years.

It likewise downgraded prospects for overall global economic growth in 2012 to 3.25 per cent from 4 per cent, as the eurozone economy is expected to surely hit recession this year. Given this scenario on the eurozone, China, which gave 9.2 per cent last year, could fall by as much as 4 percentage points. Global growth will also decline overall by 1.75 percentage points.