Shanghai Securities News:
China still faces some difficulties and challenges in developing the real economy. What measures will be taken to promote the high-quality development of real-economy sectors, including a new type of real economy-based enterprises? Thank you.
Lin Nianxiu:
The real economy is a cornerstone of our country and a wellspring of wealth. Attaching high importance to the real economy, General Secretary Xi Jinping gave important instructions on various occasions, pointing the way forward and providing guidelines to carry out related work.
Through years of effort, major advances have been made in China's real economy in terms of size, scale, structure, and quality, which is an outstanding achievement in the world's history. Our added value of the manufacturing sector has ranked top worldwide for 12 consecutive years. China has become the world's largest producer of over 220 categories of industrial products, and the only country in the world to have all the industrial categories listed in the United Nations' industrial classification. The influence of Chinese manufacturing on global industrial and supply chains has been increasing. All these are the biggest source of inspiration that will enable us to achieve the transformation from a major economy to an economic powerhouse.
However, compared with the world's industrial powerhouses, there are still some deficiencies and weak links in our work on developing the real economy, that have caused us to fall short of the requirements of high-quality development. To accelerate remedying these deficiencies, we will double our efforts and take coordinated action that covers all sectors and focus on two priorities to promote the high-quality development of the real economy.
The first priority is to continue boosting the industrial economy to increase the size of the real economy. The Central Economic Work Conference required us to seek steady progress in economic work this year. To stabilize the economy, I think we should first stabilize the industrial sector by maintaining its growth at a certain pace. At the end of last year, in accordance with the plans of the CPC Central Committee and the State Council, the NDRC worked together with relevant departments to issue an implementation plan to invigorate the industrial economy and promote high-quality industrial development. Recently, with the approval by the State Council, another document was issued on several policies for promoting steady growth of the industrial economy. In order to accelerate the implementation of relevant policies, the NDRC and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) jointly held a national teleconference recently to make concrete plans to maintain the stable growth of the industrial economy. Next, relevant departments and local governments will continue efforts to implement the above two documents to ensure our policies bring benefits to enterprises as soon as possible and to promote the steady and healthy development of the industrial economy.
On the one hand, we will provide vital relief to businesses and reduce their burdens to help them survive and achieve better development. Enterprises are market entities. The stable performance of enterprises will help maintain market confidence with better economic prospects. To achieve this, we will truly ease the tax burden on businesses, strengthen financial support, and make an all-out effort to ensure supply and price stability of important raw materials and primary products. We will also stabilize the production and business operations of big enterprises, relieve the burden on small and medium enterprises, and increase the vitality of high-tech enterprises. By keeping market entities of all kinds fully motivated, we will boost market confidence as well as development expectations.
On the other hand, we will invigorate enterprises by solid investment and strengthen the basis for sustained growth. Investment in manufacturing plays an important role in stabilizing current economic growth, as well as affecting future industrial structure and development momentum. With manufacturing investment high on our agenda, we will work to facilitate transformation in traditional industries and foster new growth drivers. Upholding a principle of ensuring all projects follow the planning and all production factors follow the projects, we will speed up preliminary work for major projects listed in the outline of the 14th Five-Year Plan and other major strategic planning to help them begin construction as soon as possible. You may have noticed that recently there have been a lot of major projects starting construction all over the country. Meanwhile, we will make efforts on the planning, reserve, and construction of major projects in various fields to help them become higher-end, smarter, more eco-friendly, giving full play to the key role of investment.
The second priority is to advance industrial restructuring to strengthen the quality of the real economy. To effectively carry out this year's economic work, we should remain committed to the general principle of pursuing progress while ensuring stability. Stability is the basis of our pursuit to further progress. In regard to the real economy, specifically, we will attach more importance to increasing its quality while keeping a certain growth pace. We will continue to promote industrial restructuring and move faster up to the medium-high end of the global value chain to realize high-quality development of our economy.
First, we will work to transform and upgrade traditional industries. Making full use of a dynamic domestic market, we will focus on traditional industries with enormous upgrading and market potential and step up efforts on technological transformation and equipment upgrading. We will expand supply based on good quality to better satisfy the needs of investment and upgrading consumption and ensure smooth flow of production, sale, and reserve. We will also promote industries with extensive energy consumption to conserve energy and reduce carbon emissions through transformation and upgrading, strengthen breakthroughs in and deployment of green technologies, and improve the level of technique in steel, non-ferrous metals, construction materials, and petrochemical industries.
Second, we will work to increase the core competitiveness of the manufacturing sector. We will take concrete actions to increase core competitiveness of the manufacturing industry, encourage enterprises to put advanced and applicable technologies into practical use, enhance equipment upgrading and large-scale applications of new products, and accelerate breakthroughs in and industrial application of core technologies in key areas, including new-energy automobiles and high-end equipment to develop new advantages over manufacturing competition. We will also support enterprises to improve brand-building, achieving a growing popularity and influence of Chinese brands.
Third, we will work to boost the integrated development of manufacturing and service industries. We will continue trials to integrate the development of advanced manufacturing and modernized services, guide local governments and enterprises to explore new models and a new path, review typical experiences and successful models and apply them on a broad scale. We will also optimize the allocation of production factors and resources, and improve the quality and efficiency of supply to support the development of high-quality manufacturing.
Xing Huina:
Today's press conference is hereby concluded. Thanks to the three speakers as well as our media friends. Goodbye.
Translated and edited by Wang Yiming, Wang Qian, Zhou Jing, Lin Liyao, Liu Sitong, Zhu Bochen, Zhang Rui, Zhang Liying, Li Huiru, Li Xiao, Wang Yanfang, Chen Xia, He Shan, Zhang Lulu, Jay Birbeck, David Ball and Tom Arnstein. In case of any discrepancy between the English and Chinese texts, the Chinese version is deemed to prevail.
