SHANGHAI, China — The laid-off factory workers and slumping car sales indicated China's booming economy was not immune to the global meltdown. New figures confirm it: China's economy is still growing, but at the slowest pace in five years.

The National Statistics Bureau said Monday the economy expanded by just 9 percent in the third quarter, the slowest rate since 2003, when growth plummeted during the SARS outbreak. By comparison, the economy grew 10.6 percent in the first quarter and 10.1 percent in the second quarter of 2008.

The government is still drafting specifics of broad plans laid out over the weekend to help counter the chill on the world's fastest growing major economy.

Details were scant. But the direction of the policy shift is clear: after years of struggling to curb lending and control spending on construction projects, an easing in China's politically sensitive inflation rate has freed its leaders to once again loosen the reins.

China is seeing the voracious global appetite for its exports dry up as consumers in the U.S. and Europe cut back on spending in the wake of the mortgage-debt meltdown. The shift is a serious challenge for Beijing it struggle to keep job-creating growth on an even keel.

"With growth now clearly on a slowing path, we expect the government to roll out a combination of fiscal, monetary, and sector/structural measures to mitigate the external shock and help to keep growth from falling sharply," Wang Tao, an economist with UBS, said in a research note.

As early as August, speculation was already building that the government was readying a still-unannounced, massive spending program to help counter the drop in demand for China's exports in the U.S. and other markets.