he 20th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) held its third plenary session in Beijing from July 15 to 18.
The CPC Central Committee is the Party’s highest-level body, and the third plenary session of each Central Committee usually discusses major issues concerning the country’s economic and social development. China’s landmark reform and opening-up policy was implemented following the third plenum of the 11th CPC Central Committee at the end of 1978.
At this third plenum, according to the main agenda, the CPC Political Bureau reported its work to the Central Committee, and the session also examined and discussed the draft of The CPC Central Committee’s Decision on Further Comprehensively Deepening Reform and Advancing Chinese Modernization.
On the first day of the plenum, Xi Jinping, general secretary of the CPC Central Committee, delivered a work report on behalf of the Political Bureau and expounded on the above-mentioned draft decision about deepening reform which was first discussed at the Political Bureau’s meeting on June 27, the Xinhua News Agency reported.
The June 27 meeting stressed that the draft decision on reform “will serve as a guiding document for further comprehensively deepening reform on the new journey.”
Also on July 15, China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) published its latest data on the country’s economic development, revealing that China’s GDP in the first half of 2024 grew by 5 percent year-on-year.
Data showed that imports and exports of goods hit 21.2 trillion yuan (US$2.9t) in the first half of 2024, 6.1 percent more than in the same period of 2023, with exports rising by 6.9 percent and imports by 5.2 percent.
Domestic demand and external demand are both recovering. In the first half of this year, final consumption expenditure contributed 60.5 percent to economic growth, and gross capital formation, a measure of investment, contributed to 25.6 percent of economic growth.
The NBS said that the level of economic growth was “hard-won,” since China is facing a “more uncertain, complex and severe external environment as well as new challenges from deepening structural adjustment domestically.”
That is why deepening reform has been front and center at all CPC meetings. The Political Bureau meeting on June 27 warned against challenges, including in-sufficient demand, high operation pressure facing enterprises and an external environment that is more complicated, grimmer and more uncertain. Another Political Bureau meeting held in April emphasized that deepening reform is “essential to upholding and improving the socialist system with Chinese characteristics and modernizing China’s governance system and capacity.”
At a meeting in April 2023, Xi proposed to “make deepening reform a fundamental drive of promoting Chinese modernization.”
Ahead of the plenum, Xi published an article on maintaining self-confidence and self-reliance in this year’s 14th issue of the Qiushi Journal, a flagship magazine of the CPC Central Committee, emphasizing that all China’s issues must be solved by China itself based on the country’s national conditions, and that only firm institutional confidence can give the country courage to deepen reform. Xi noted that institutional confidence comes from continuous reforms which aim to remove the drawbacks in institutions and systems to better show the advantages of socialism.
On July 16, Xinhua published an article detailing the 72 CPC Central Committee meetings presided over by Xi over the past decade, revealing that the meetings issued more than 600 documents on reform which led to over 3,000 reform programs covering economic transition, medical care, agriculture, finance, education, elderly support, residence registration and environmental protection.
According to the draft Decision on Further Comprehensively Deepening Reform and Advancing Chinese Modernization, China’s overarching goal of further comprehensively deepening reform is to continue improving and developing the system of socialism with Chinese characteristics and modernize China’s system and capacity for governance. By 2035, the building of a high-standard socialist market economy will be completed across the board, the system of socialism with Chinese characteristics will be improved, the country’s system and capacity for governance will be basically modernized, and socialist modernization will be basically realized. All these will lay a solid foundation for building a great modern socialist country in all respects by the middle of this century.
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