China is undergoing a strategic economic restructuring in an
environment of the new technology revolution, covering industrial,
regional, urban and rural structural reform. Only in this way can
it adapt to the intense international competition amid economic
globalization.
Wang Chunzheng, vice minister of the State Development Planning
Commission made this point in his speech of “China’s economic
restructuring in the economic globalization process” at the China
Development Forum.
The information technological revolution has greatly speeded up
economic globalization and informatization trend, providing both
broad opportunities and severe challenges for China’s development.
In the past 20 years since the country’s opening-up there has been
dramatic increase in our gross national productivity.
The imbalance between supply and demand has basically ended. But
periodical and structural surpluses have appeared in daily
industrial and agricultural products supply. The problem of an
irrational economic structure has started to show up, mainly
reflected in uncoordinated regional development, low level of
urbanization, general low quality of the national economy and a
blunted international competitive edge.
Wang said: “This structural deficiency is neither compatible with
the needs of speeding up economic development nor to further open
ourselves to the globalization drive.”
“The outline of the tenth Five-Year Plan (2001-05) for the national
economic and social development, which was adopted in the recent
Fourth Session of the Ninth National People’s Congress, has
specified the main projects for economic restructuring in the next
five years: optimizing and upgrading the industrial structure to
promote the national competitive edge; enhancing the balance of
ratios between the primary, secondary and service industries in the
gross domestic product to 13 percent, 51 percent and 36 percent
respectively; remarkably improving the information level of society
and the national economy; narrowing the development gap between
regions and increase the level of urbanization.”
Wand said that, to achieve this goal, the country has to pay close
attention to the following aspects:
--
To accelerate the pace of industrial restructuring. The focus of
the reform in the coming five years is to “enforce primary
industry, promote second industry and develop tertiary industry.”
Priority should be given to the development of information,
financial and insurance services.
--
To vigorously boost national economic informatization and integrate
it with the restructuring model.
--
To improve the urbanization level and optimize the urban and rural
economic structure. In the next five years, with gradual
improvement of rural productivity and accelerating
industrialization process, a urbanization strategy is needed to
“selectively develop some satellite small towns, proactively
develop medium-sized and small cities, further improve regional
central cities’ functions and bring into full play to the big
cities’ function of radiating economic growth out to peripheral
areas.”
--
To restructure the distribution of productive forces to boost and
achieve balance in regional economic development. While
accelerating the development of central and western China, the
government must simultaneously keep giving full play to the
“engine” function of the eastern coastal regions in terms of
structural reform, scientific innovation, opening-up and fast
economic development. Breakthrough development for infrastructure
facilities and ecological environment in the western region should
be achieved in five to 10 years and a significant development
witnessed in education, science and technology.
(CIIC 04/03/2001)