The 20th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China is in the midst of its Third Plenum, a key policy meeting that will set the country’s development plan for the next five to ten years.
The meeting in the capital, Beijing, comes against a backdrop of growing economic challenges at home and geopolitical challenges and competition abroad.
On Tuesday, the country announced weaker-than-expected growth figures for the first half of the year, prompting some investment banks, including Goldman Sachs, to cut their annual growth forecasts for the world’s second-largest economy.
On the other hand, the possibility of Donald Trump’s return to the White House has raised concerns that Washington will adopt a more hawkish policy towards China.
As President Xi Jinping prepared to deliver a work report at the closed-door meeting, the party’s leading theoretical magazine Qiushi on Tuesday published an appeal from the Chinese leader entitled ‘Safeguarding the Principles of Self-Reliance and Self-Sufficiency’.
It called on Party members to show unswerving faith and commitment to the development path China has set for itself, warning that there is no “ready-made solution” or “foreign manual” to follow.
This and previous articles suggest that China will continue its distinctive process of reform and opening up, while maintaining its development strategy focused on technology, advanced manufacturing and other sectors considered critical to the country’s overall strength.
This is in line with Xi’s vision of improving Party governance and achieving China’s ‘great rejuvenation’.
Xie Maosong, a senior researcher at Tsinghua University’s National Institute for Strategic Studies, said the official message clearly signals that Xi will not deviate from his chosen path and will institutionalise his brand of reform to ensure it becomes a ‘great political legacy’.
Deng Yuwen, former deputy editor of Study Times, the official newspaper of the Central Party School, warned that the party must take public sentiment into account as discontent grows over the slowing economy.
According to a recent survey [by US-based Big Data China], Chinese people today tend to blame unequal opportunities and an unfair system for their poor economic situation rather than their own incompetence,” Deng said: “People want basic things like more upward mobility, fairer job opportunities and food security. The party has to show that it can deliver these things.”
