Premier Li Keqiang's speech at Summer Davos opening ceremony

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang on Wednesday delivered a speech at the opening ceremony of the Annual Meeting of the New Champions 2014, also known as the Summer Davos Forum.

The following is the full text of Li's speech:

Creating New Dynamism Through Reform and Innovation

Address at the World Economic Forum

Annual Meeting of the New Champions 2014

By Premier Li Keqiang

10 September 2014

Dear Professor Klaus Schwab, Your Excellencies Heads of State and Government, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen, Dear Friends,

It gives me great pleasure to meet you here in Tianjin at the eighth Annual Meeting of the New Champions, or the Summer Davos Forum. On behalf of the Chinese government, I wish to extend warm congratulations on the opening of the Forum and a cordial welcome to all of you who have come from afar.

The theme for this year's Forum, namely "Creating Value Through Innovation", is a most relevant one. Innovation is an eternal topic of the human society and an inexhaustible engine driving economic and social development. Innovation is vital to the steady recovery of the world economy. Innovation is also essential to upgrading the Chinese economy and improving its performance. And it is thanks to reform and innovation that the Chinese economy has in recent years maintained steady and sound growth.

The global economic environment has remained an intricate one since the beginning of this year. The road to recovery in developed countries has remained bumpy. Growth in emerging market economies has slowed down, and the Chinese economy faces greater downward pressure. Facing this challenging environment, we have continued to follow the general principle of making progress while maintaining stability. We have stayed the course and pursued a proactive approach. Instead of adopting strong economic stimulus or easing monetary policy, we have vigorously promoted reform and economic readjustment, and made efforts to improve people's lives. As a result, we have maintained steady economic performance. In the first half of the year, the Chinese economy registered a 7.4 percent growth, and CPI rise was kept at 2.3 percent. Despite economic slowdown, between January and August, the surveyed unemployment rate was kept at around 5 percent in 31 big and medium-sized cities. More than 9.7 million urban jobs were created, which is over one hundred thousand more compared with the same period last year.

Despite growing downward pressure on the economy, more jobs were created, thanks to new steps of reform taken. Since the beginning of this government, we have advanced the reform of the administrative review and approval system. Government departments have removed or delegated to lower levels administrative approval on over 600 items, and this year, the business registration reform, among others, has been carried out nationwide. This has lowered the threshold for starting businesses and removed restrictions on them, thus giving a great boost to business development in the whole country. Between January and August, the amount of newly registered market entities was more than eight million, and from March to August, with the business registration reform, the number of newly registered businesses grew by 61 percent over the previous year, all pointing to a massive upsurge which has generated more than 10 million jobs. In addition to reforming the business registration system, we have also introduced reforms to investment financing, taxation and logistics systems, and further opened the gate for the development of the service sector and other emerging industries. All these measures have been vital in fostering and increasing job opportunities.

The positive changes in China's economy are not only reflected in the increase of jobs and residents' incomes, but also in the structural upgrading. We have streamlined administration, delegated powers to the lower levels, and adopted fiscal, taxation and financial measures such as targeted tax reduction and targeted reduction of required bank reserve ratio. All these measures have spurred the growth of the service sector, agriculture, rural area and the welfare of farmers, as well as small and micro-businesses, private businesses and emerging industries. In the first half of the year, new businesses and new business models such as logistics, express delivery and e-commerce all developed fast. The number of newly registered service businesses surged by more than 70 percent. The tertiary industry continued to outperform the secondary industry in terms of growth rate and share of GDP, and is a leading sector of the economy. The share of private investment in fixed asset investment increased by 1.4 percentage points year on year. High-tech industries and equipment manufacturing grew faster than the industrial average.

Deepening structural readjustment has improved the quality of economic growth. On the basis of carrying out reform and innovation, we have reduced overcapacity, eliminating outdated capacity in particular, and fostered new growth areas. In the first half of the year, the growth of investment and production of industries with high energy consumption and emissions noticeably slowed down. The per unit GDP energy consumption dropped by 4.2 percent year on year, and carbon intensity was cut by about 5 percent, the largest drop in many years.

We have managed to ensure steady growth and improve the quality of the Chinese economy by taking targeted, range-based macro-control measures. With focus on key areas and weak links of China's economic and social development, we have used more reform and innovation measures to incentivize market entities, strengthen weak links, boost the real economy and ensure that our efforts are well-targeted. This approach, which was also structural adjustment in nature, involved both reform and readjustments. We have strived to remove market obstacles and make the market play a decisive role in resources allocation. We have also endeavored to improve the role of the government and promote social equity. We have worked actively to balance domestic and international demands, coordinate regional development, narrow the gap between rural and urban areas and stabilize agricultural supply and demand. We have strengthened the construction of railways in central and western China, the renovation of rundown areas, as well as pollution control and prevention and other livelihood and development projects. We have actively tackled the bottlenecks that have long constrained China's balanced development. All of these have vigorously supported the process toward a new type of industrialization and effectively increased the supply of public goods.