NEW YORK – In early March, Premier Li Keqiang announced that China is targeting GDP growth of “about 5.5 percent” this year. That would be ambitious even without Russia’s war against Ukraine and the attendant increases in global energy and food prices. Back in January, for example, the International Monetary Fund forecast that the Chinese economy would grow by only 4.8 percent in 2022. And in 2019, the last full year before the COVID-19 pandemic, GDP increased by just under 6 percent.