Chinese Premier Li Keqiang is hosting a press conference at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, March 15, 2015. [Dong Ning/China.org.cn]

Following the annual sessions of the National People's Congress (NPC) and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, about 5,000 delegates have left the capital and gone their separate ways with heavy workloads for the coming year. The direction of the session was already clear in advance: the "Four Comprehensives" program provided an outline. Now more detail has been thrashed out, and the practical steps to be taken have become a bit clearer.

For a start, the meetings bore the clear imprint of President Xi Jinping's leadership style. He came across as being very much in personal control: It was noticeable that his two predecessors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, have retired from the NPC and were thus not present, leaving the field clear for the new leadership. At a time of economic change and intensive reform, the president wished to display a firm grip on the direction of events.

As predicted, emphasis was laid on the management of economic expectations; no one was surprised that the target set for this year's economic growth was "around 7 percent" – it is probably sensible to set an approximate rather than an exact figure, given the uncertainty of the global situation, and one would not wish to see distortions applied to activities at the end of the year in order to hit precisely some arbitrary figure. As has been repeatedly pointed out, slower growth is the new normal, rather than a frenetic pursuit of expansion at all costs.

Quite apart from the continuation of China's internal economic reform, launched by Deng Xiaoping more than thirty years ago, the real challenge is posed by the need to integrate China's economy better with the surrounding world in which it has now become such a major player. The special circumstances of China's emergence from poverty and backwardness have always called for a degree of special treatment; and the speed of that emergence has left the Chinese economy curiously poised between the developed and the developing world, with definite characteristics of both. The difficult task now is to engage with the outside world on equal terms without risking unpalatable shocks to the domestic economy.

A key element here is the planned expansion of the new network of Free Trade Zones launched in September 2013 with a pilot project in Shanghai, which has gone some way to create a logistical and financial interface between the restrictions imposed by China and the outside world. Following the NPC meeting a new zone will be opened in Guangdong. This will serve the key objective of facilitating cross-border collaboration, and thereby economic integration, with the two existing special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macao, with the ultimate aim of creating a business environment functioning according to international norms and standards, harnessing the innovative capacity of Guangdong to global financial mechanisms.