Aerial photo shows the installation scene of the final stayed cables for a grand cable-stayed railway bridge over Xijiang River in south China's Guangdong Province, July 22, 2020. (Xinhua/Liu Dawei)

"China paid a price for a short period of time when the economy declined, but they have the tremendous benefit of being able to responsibly open the economy in the second half of the year."

SANTIAGO, Aug. 2 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese economy made a V-shaped recovery in the first half of the year thanks to the government's measures in curbing the spread of COVID-19, Chilean experts have said.

Hassan Akram, a professor at Diego Portales University in Chile, said the strict measures taken by the Chinese government enable its economy to recover in the long run.

The expert explained that China paid a price for a short period of time when the economy declined, but "they have the tremendous benefit of being able to responsibly open the economy in the second half of the year."

"China made very strong sanitary decisions that slowed down the economy due to total quarantine. They closed factories and froze the entire economy. That obviously had a much greater contraction effect (on the economy) than in other countries," he said.

A man wearing a face mask buys breakfast amid COVID-19 pandemic in Hong Kong, south China, Aug. 1, 2020. (Xinhua/Lo Ping Fai)

However, these restrictive measures allowed a reversal in the second quarter, during which China's economy grew 3.2 percent year on year.

Akram compared China's situation with that of the United States, where the virus has still not been contained and "the authorities called for quarantine very late."

"That generates the problem of the slowdown in the economy," Akram said.

The U.S. economy contracted at an annual rate of 32.9 percent in the second quarter of the year, the steepest decline since the government started to keep records in 1947, the Commerce Department reported Thursday.

People wearing face masks take a bus in the Central area of Hong Kong, south China, July 27, 2020. (Xinhua/Wang Shen)

Luis Valenzuela Rivera, an academic at the Institute of Economics at the Austral University of Chile, spoke highly of China's quick handling of the pandemic.

Valenzuela Rivera said that despite its large geographical size and population, China controlled the pandemic in a way that "no other country has managed to do," which allowed for "a swift reopening of the economy."

The measures taken by China have helped its economy "to avoid a recession and to have a fairly decent performance under the circumstances," said the expert. ■