Yiping Huang
On 23 May 2024, Chinese President Xi Jinping chaired a symposium of high-profile business and academic representatives in Jinan, the capital city of Shandong province. A widely publicised presentation from my colleague and well-known reform-minded scholar, Zhou Qiren, to that session raised expectations of an ambitious reform agenda at the upcoming Third Plenum of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, which will kick off on Monday, 15 July.
Nearly 46 years ago, the Third Plenum of the 11th Party Congress, in December 1978, decided to undertake China’s economic reform. Since then, each of the past eight Third Plenums has maintained the tradition of focusing on economic reform.
China’s Politburo Meeting on 30 April suggests that the key themes of the upcoming Plenum include deepening comprehensive reform and modernisation. It set out a policy approach of ‘running toward the problem and focusing on correcting it’. Instead of adopting a grand scale liberalisation policy, the Plenum is more likely to announce policy measures to overcome some specific bottlenecks to sustainable growth.
The biggest factor in China’s economic success during the past decades was its transition from a centrally planned system toward a market economy. It also benefited greatly from conditions such as its low-labour cost advantage, its demographic dividend and open international trade and investment regimes.
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