The 20th Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee’s third plenary session concluded on Thursday (July 18) with the adoption of a five-year plan that aims to upgrade Chinese industries and push forward economic reforms.
About 200 CCP Central Committee members adopted the “Resolution on Further Deepening Reform Comprehensively to Advance Chinese Modernization” during the four-day Third Plenum.
A total of 165 alternate Central Committee members and some disciplinary officials, academics, experts and other CCP representatives also attended the plenum. A full official version of the resolution had not been released as of Friday (July 19) but CCP officials elaborated on its content at a media conference.
“The resolution, with economic structural reform as the spearhead, comprehensively plans reforms in various fields and aspects,” Tang Fangyu, deputy head of the CPC Central Committee Policy Research Office, said at a media briefing on Friday. “The resolution puts forward more than 300 important reform measures, all of which involve reforms on the levels of systems, mechanisms and institutions.”
Tang said China’s ongoing modernization faces many complex issues, necessitating deeper comprehensive reforms to better adapt the relations of production with productive forces, the superstructure to the economic base and national governance to social development.
China will accelerate efforts to build a high-standard market system, which is still a major reform task for the country, said Han Wenxiu, executive deputy director of the Office of the Central Committee for Financial and Economic Affairs.
He said efforts will be made to build a unified national market, including the development of a unified urban-rural construction land market, a nationwide integrated technology and data market, and a unified national electricity market.
In the Third Plenum’s communique released on Thursday, the CCP said the overall objectives of the further deepening of comprehensive reform are to continue improving and developing socialism with Chinese characteristics and modernizing China’s system and capacity for governance.
“By 2035, we will have finished building a high-standard socialist market economy in all respects, further improved the system of socialism with Chinese characteristics, generally modernized our system and capacity for governance, and basically realized socialist modernization,” the communique said.
It added that the reform tasks laid out in the resolution shall be completed by the time the People’s Republic of China celebrates its 80th founding anniversary in 2029 while China will become a great modern socialist country in all respects by the middle of this century.
‘Beware of foreign ideology’
The communique and the resolution came after Qiushi, the CCP’s official theoretical journal, published an article on July 15 titled “Must maintain self-confidence and self-reliance.”
The article, a collection of previous speeches made by CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping, said China must remain firm in its conviction in Marxism and socialism with Chinese characteristics. It said China should not “swallow foreign ideas without digesting them,” or “Shi Yang Bu Hua” in Mandarin.
The phrase was used by Xi in a speech about Marxism in November 2015. At the time, Xi said that China should stick to the principles and methodology of Marxist political economics when incorporating Western economic and financial knowledge.
He said foreign knowledge that can help China expand production and the market should be absorbed but those reflecting the nature and value of capitalist ideology must not be copied in China.
“Shi Yang Bu Hua” was used in a broader context in other CCP articles to remind people that China should learn from foreign experiences but not become fully Westernized, especially when reforming its cultural, political and legal systems.
Tamkang University political scientist Hung Yao-Nan said in a panel discussion in Taiwan on Thursday that Xi’s calling for socialist modernization shows that he refuses to accept the West’s market economy and political systems, which he said have continued to evolve over the past 400 to 500 years.
Despite the recent economic setbacks seen in China, Hung said Xi still believes that the world today is undergoing “major changes unseen in a century” and that Western civilization is declining while China’s is rising.
Ming Chu-cheng, a professor at the Department of Political Science at National Taiwan University, said Xi’s economic reforms mark a reversal of those implemented by former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, who allowed the decentralization of government powers and encouraged flexible economic policies.
Ming said while Xi claims to support a market economy, he is actually doing the opposite by strengthening the role of state-owned enterprises in the Chinese economy.
Xi over-praised
When Qiushi published Xi’s article on July 15, the official Xinhua News Agency also published a commentary praising Xi as China’s “supreme reformist,” a title higher than Deng’s “architect of China’s economic reforms.”
The Xinhua article said Xi is another great reformer after Deng on the same mission to modernize China but that the paramount leaders faced different situations.
It said when Deng started the country’s liberalizing reforms, China’s GDP per capita was less than US$200; when Xi took office as CCP General Secretary in 2012, China was already the world’s second-largest economy with a GDP per capita of over $6,000. However, it said some of China’s advantages, such as low labor costs, are now diminishing.
“The easy and joyful reforms have already been completed. Delicious meats have been eaten and the remains are all bones,” Xi was quoted saying in the article, with “bones” alluding to more difficult economic reforms.
The article praised Xi for having doubled China’s GDP since 2012, a period over which he has overseen more than 2,000 reform measures. For unknown reasons, the article was taken down from China’s highly censored internet on July 16. It’s still available on overseas websites, however.
Some commentators opined the article was politically incorrect as it over-praised Xi’s economic achievements while the Chinese public felt that the economy is underperforming at the moment.
As China faces many challenges, including a slowing economy, a property crisis and foreign technology blocks, it’s not appropriate to publish an article to praise Xi now, Yuan Juzheng, a professor at the Department of Philosophy, National Taiwan University, said in a TV program.
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