China has determined to weather the cold financial winter together with the rest of the world with concrete measures, says an article in the Beijing Times. The following is an excerpt:
The recent G20 meeting held in Washington DC has attracted wide attention from the whole world. People hope that this meeting can help the world effectively deal with the ongoing global recession. President Hu Jintao called for a reform of the international financial system with concrete measures at the meeting, stressing that the international community should carefully draw a lesson from this financial crisis.
For the world economy, it's obviously a hard time. The financial crisis triggered by the subprime mess has spread to affect all countries more or less. Even for China, there are signs of slowdown in various fields such as exports and imports, although China has not yet been plagued by complicated derivative products and subprime problems.
The summit meeting put forward three types of countermeasures - for short term, mid-term and long- term respectively.
In the short term, every country realizes that they should loosen monetary policies and expand government investments to provide a certain degree of liquidity for the market. For mid-term solutions, the crisis can be overcome only by recovering market confidence. To reach this aim, we must ensure the mainstream economy can maintain a certain degree of growth. In the long run, it's necessary to fundamentally reform the current international financial system, which was also one of the hottest topics at this meeting.
The meeting shows that China plays a pivotal role in the short-term, mid-term or long-term financial countermeasures. China has already shown its determination to shoulder the responsibility of shoring up the market together with developed countries.
The Chinese government's endeavor to do a good job at home itself contributes to the stability of the world financial system.
For many economies of the world, there is a cold winter waiting ahead. In the age of globalized capital flow, hardness and happiness can spread at a second. We can't predict when this financial crisis will end, but we know we need policies to protect both ourselves and our neighbors.
(China Daily November 18, 2008)
