In recent years, the frequent and large fluctuations of economic growth make it more difficult to give a point or a trend estimation of economic growth, which puts forward higher requirements for economic growth forecasting. This paper breaks away from the traditional point estimation as well as trend estimation, and comprehensively uses the TVP-FAVAR-DMA model, the unexpected conditional volatility high-dimensional factor model, and other high-dimensional data models, as well as quantile regression, Q-VAR model, and GaR model to describe the shape variation of China’s economic growth.

The results show that the financial condition index, external economic uncertainty, and core inflation are all of great significance for predicting the distribution of economic growth in China, but their forecasting abilities keep changing and deviate from each other. They all have played an important role in driving economic growth in different stages. Financial factors dominated the economic downward trend in the period of financial crisis, external uncertainty mainly affected the economic growth in the period of trade friction, and inflation in the period of COVID-19 epidemic contains effective information to forecast economic growth, which confirms a real economy effect of epidemic shock. Nowadays, China’s economy is under a new stage of recovery after the epidemic. External uncertainty, financial risk, as well as core inflation are all running relatively smoothly, and there are no prominent crisis events such as financial crisis, trade friction, etc. Therefore, whatever the condition is, the growth distribution at risk will be close to its self-distribution. It proves that the recovery of China’s economic growth is of great certainty, and it is likely to continue to recover steadily in future. As for the current trace of economic recovery, the real GDP growth rate in the first quarter of 2023 was 4.9%, and the counterpart in the second quarter rose to 6.3%, showing a benign and moderate recovery trend. This indicates that China’s economy will have a great probability to take this situation as a new start, and return back again to the medium-high speed growth plane.