Chinese President Xi Jinping delivers his New Year speech in Beijing, Dec 31, 2015. [Photo/Xinhua]

The core of the message to the outside world lay in the President Xi Jinping's assertion that "the international community expects to hear China's voice and be aware of China's plans. China will not be absent from the world's debate." This is not new, of course. For some time now, the world has recognized China as a force to be reckoned with. But in order to understand what the world can expect from China in 2016, it is useful to analyze the carefully considered content of the President's New Year Address.

President Xi emphasized that the strengthened position of China in the world is, and will continue to be, based on a continued reform and strengthening of China's polity and economy. Though it is likely that China's economic growth will stabilize at a somewhat lower level than during the "boom years," it will continue to lead the world for the foreseeable future. Internal reform, particularly in the judicial field and that of discipline and anti-corruption in the Party and government, will continue to be pushed forward. Most importantly, despite a certain amount of economic turbulence during 2015, the general public continues to enjoy a sense of growing prosperity.

China will continue to pursue global leadership in the fields of science and technology. The start of production of the Chinese-built C919 large passenger aircraft represents a real challenge to the current domination of European- and American-built passenger aircrafts, which in the last 20 years have monopolized even the Chinese domestic flight market. President Xi also mentioned the launch of a satellite developed by Chinese scientists to detect "dark matter," and honoured China's first scientific Nobel Prize winner, Tu Youyou.

The direction of planned progress was laid out in October 2015's 5th Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee. The work program adopted focused on promoting structural reform, social fairness and justice, and a sustainable environmental protection regime. As was demonstrated at the December UN conference in Paris, China is willing to take a leading role at a global as well as domestic level to tackle the problems of pollution and climate change. Domestically, President Xi says that his government will aim to build a moderately prosperous society in China in a comprehensive fashion, aiming at spreading the prosperity among all sectors of society rather than allowing a potentially dangerous inequality to develop.