China’s economy making steady progress

Since the beginning of this year, the CPC Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping as the core has led and united the whole Party and people of all ethnic groups of China to ensure effective COVID-19 containment, economic stability and development security, against the backdrop of the complex and changing international landscape and the daunting task of reform and development at home.

The CPC Central Committee has taken into account both domestic and international imperatives, responded to the COVID-19 pandemic while promoting economic and social development, pursued development while ensuring security and strengthened macro regulation, ensuring economic and social stability.

Over the past 10 years of the new era, China has seen historic achievements and development in the country’s causes, witnessed historic transformation and embarked on a journey of high-quality development. China’s economy is like a colossal vessel, which needs a good steersman when sailing on stormy seas.

The CPC Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping as the core has made several important judgements such as China has entered a new normal in economic development, having shifted from high-speed growth to high-quality development, made the important decision of having an accurate understanding of this new stage of development, fully applying the new development philosophy, and creating a new development pattern to promote high-quality development, and rolled out major plans such as building a modernized economy, deepening supply-side structural reforms, and expanding domestic demand as a strategic priority. These moves have demonstrated the exceptional skills of the CPC Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping as the core in dealing with complexities and its great wisdom in leading China’s development.

China has accelerated its self-reliance and self-improvement efforts in science and technology and, with the support of an effective mobilization system and a coordinated resource allocation model, successfully made a series of achievements including its supercomputer, manned spaceship, the Beijing Daxing International Airport, the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge, and the genome sequence of the COVID-19 virus.

China has won the largest battle against poverty in human history. It assigned more than 3 million first secretaries and officials to villages nationwide, where they worked on the front lines alongside nearly 2 million town and township officials and millions of village officials.

The country has remained committed to and improved basic socialist economic systems, improved the socialist market economy, built a high-standard market system, and developed new systems for a higher-standard open economy. The system of socialism with Chinese characteristics has become more mature and well-defined, providing a huge boost for the ship of China’s economy as it braves winds and waves.

In China’s efforts to alleviate poverty, the country has mobilized the entire nation, rolled out holistic policy, working and mechanism systems, and launched several measures such as enhancing collaboration between the eastern and western regions on poverty alleviation, targeted poverty alleviation and the policy of pairing-up support. China has blazed a path of poverty alleviation with Chinese characteristics, bringing about a great miracle in human history.

The 14th Five-Year Plan and the Long-Range Objectives through the Year 2035 envisage the country’s development for the future.

China has witnessed fruitful results in institutional innovation, gathered development momentum, given play to its development strength, and released its development potential.

Major strategies, such as the coordinated development of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, the development of the Yangtze River Economic Belt, the construction of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, the integrated development of the Yangtze River Delta, and ecological protection and high-quality development in the Yellow River basin have progressed steadily, laying a solid foundation for coordinated regional development.

Supply-side structural reform, reforms to streamline administration and delegate power, reform in the property rights system, and reforms to promote the market-based allocation of production factors are being continuously deepened, facilitating high-quality development.

China has worked faster to push high-level opening up, setting up 21 pilot free trade zones across the country, and seen steady progress in the Hainan Free Trade Port and Pudong New Area in Shanghai.

China has worked faster to implement all kinds of policies, such as macro, micro, reform and social policies, and quickly adopted a host of policies to reduce burdens on businesses, which has helped stabilize industrial chains and supply chains. As a result, China’s economy expanded 3.9 percent year on year in the third quarter of 2022, up by 3.5 percentage points compared to the second quarter.

China's total grain output increased from 113.2 million tons in 1949, the year the People's Republic of China was founded, to above 686.5 million tons in 2022. In addition to feeding its own population, the country has always had control over its own food supply, and made a huge contribution to global food security while reducing the hungry population in the world.

Several decades ago, China’s per capita gross national income was less than $100 dollars, but China’s per capita GDP has now surpassed $12,000 dollars. In just a few decades, China has established the world’s largest and most complete industrial system from scratch, becoming the second largest economy, the largest industrial country, and the largest trader in goods in the world.

Thomas Orlik, an economist, implied in his book China: The Bubble that Never Pops that the history of China’s economic development is like the history of the failure of all kinds of China collapse theories.

With a population of 1.4 billion and a middle-income group of more than 400 million people, China is the world’s most promising and largest market. China is a major country of human resources, as it has over 60 million highly skilled talents, and 240 million people have received higher education. China has made world-class achievements in basic research and high-tech fields with strategic significance, and has joined the ranks of the world’s innovators.

China's contribution to global economic growth during the 2013-2021 period averaged 38.6 percent, ranking first in the world.

China's per capita disposable annual income has risen from 16,500 yuan (about $2,377.65) in 2012 to 35,100 yuan in 2021, with 1.04 billion people covered by basic pensions. 

Everyone’s lives have been enriched through the progress achieved in the modern era and subsequent national development. Standards of living have, and continue to be gradually enriched and improved. The millennium dream of a well-off society, the centenary dream of prosperity, the dreams of traveling to space and of diving deep in the ocean, the dream of Olympic gold medals--these feats were once regarded as impossible, yet are now taking place. The dreams once considered unattainable have become an unstoppable reality.