Observer: China pursues high-quality development, delivers good performance during 13th Five-Year Plan period
People's Daily app
1603724381000

Last year, China’s GDP was close to 100 trillion yuan (about $14.37 trillion) and its per capita GDP exceeded $10,000.

The country ranked second globally in the investment into research and development (R&D) and topped the world’s ranking in R&D personnel and global patent applications.

Meanwhile, more than 60 million new urban jobs were created. Absolute poverty, which has haunted the Chinese nation for thousands of years, became a thing of the past.

China’s strength in economic, scientific and technological fields, as well as its overall national strength, have entered a new stage after its development in the 13th Five-Year Plan period (2016-2020), said Chinese President Xi Jinping, also General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee.

China’s outstanding performance in its economy with reasonable growth and steady improvement demonstrated the country’s vibrant momentum for economic and social development and its extraordinary journey of overcoming difficulties as a major country.

Facing new trends, opportunities, problems and new challenges in economic and social development, the fifth plenary session of the 18th CPC Central Committee proposed the new philosophy of innovative, coordinated, green, and open development for all. The philosophy demonstrates the path that China must follow in order to realize development that is higher in quality and more efficient, equitable and sustainable. As Xi put it, high-quality development reflects the new development philosophy that focuses more on sound economic performance rather than on quality expansion.

In 2019, China’s final consumption contributed 57.8 percent to the country’s economic growth. The added value of China’s tertiary industry accounted for 53.9 percent of the country’s GDP, and the value-added output of new industries, new types of business, and new business models exceeded 16 trillion yuan.

Besides, air quality in 337 cities at and above the prefecture level was recorded as being good on an average of 82 percent of days last year.

Over the past five years, China has worked hard for better quality, higher efficiency, and more robust drivers of economic growth through reform, resolved difficulties in development, cultivated new advantages and made major breakthroughs in transforming growth model, improving economic structure, and fostering new drivers of growth.

This didn’t come easily. For China with a huge economic aggregate and a large population, the transition from a phase of rapid growth to a stage of high-quality development is no easy task.

Between 2016 and 2020, the CPC Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core has rallied the entire Party and Chinese people and led them in breaking new grounds with great courage and determination. China has remained committed to the underlying principle of pursuing progress while ensuring stability, applied the new development philosophy with a focus on supply-side structural reforms, and promoted high-quality development.

As a result, the Chinese economy has maintained a steady performance overall, with improvements in economic structure, steadily advanced agricultural modernization, remarkable achievements in poverty relief, intensified efforts in pollution prevention and control, progress in ecological environment, and major breakthroughs in deepening all-round reform.

Moreover, the opening up has been continuously expanded and the Belt and Road cooperation has achieved fruitful results. People’s living conditions have seen marked improvements and the modernization of the governance system and capacity has been accelerated.

Facing a complex situation and arduous tasks, China will steadfastly pursue the strategy of expanding domestic demand, take satisfying domestic demand as the starting point and ultimate goal of promoting high-quality development, and accelerate the establishment of a “dual circulation” development pattern in which domestic economic cycle plays a leading role while international economic cycle remains its extension and supplement.

Looking back at immense hardships and facing dramatic changes across the world, we know more than ever that China has gone through an extraordinary journey and made a historical transformation.

The world is going through unprecedented changes unseen in a century. The sudden COVID-19 epidemic has posed challenges for China in completing the 13th Five-Year Plan and achieving the goals set at the beginning of this year.

Against such background, China’s exports have achieved positive growth for six consecutive months since April. In the first half of this year, the country’s investment in high-tech manufacturing industries and high-tech services went up by 5.8 percent and 7.2 percent, respectively, thanks to booming emerging sectors and the replacement of the old growth drivers.

In the first three quarters, China’s GDP expanded 0.7 percent year on year. Specifically, the country’s GDP for Q1 declined by 6.8 percent year on year, increased by 3.2 percent in Q2 and 4.9 percent in Q3.

China will be the only major economy in the world to show positive growth this year, according to the latest World Economic Outlook released by the International Monetary Fund.

China will create new opportunities in crises and open up new prospects in a changing situation, which is an epitome of the country’s efforts to promote high-quality development.