(Yicai Global) April 17 -- China's mainland stock markets gave back some of their earlier gains in the afternoon but finished above the starting point as investors were mulling over the country's bigger-than-expected gross domestic product drop in the first quarter.

The Shanghai Composite Index climbed 0.66 percent to 2,838.49. The Shenzhen Component Index advanced 0.55 percent to 10,527.99. The ChiNext Price Index, which tracks growth enterprises listed in Shenzhen, ended 0.62 percent up at 2,020.77, after touching a one-month high of 2,048.20 intraday.

China's GDP narrowed 6.8 percent to CNY20.65 trillion (USD2.92 trillion) in the first quarter from a year earlier due to the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. That was the first quarterly contraction ever recorded since the nation adopted GDP as an economic indicator in the early 1990s. An Yicai Global survey of 23 chief economists had predicted that the decline would be 6.48 percent.

Editor: Emmi Laine