China Answers | Chinese and American economists: Significance and future of China’s high-quality development

By Chen Tianhao, Zhao Li

(ECNS) -- In the latest episode of China Answers, Robert Lawrence Kuhn, Chairman of the Kuhn Foundation, is invited to ask some questions he has about China's high-quality development after carefully studying the Communiqué during the Third Plenary Session of the 20th CPC Central Committee. He has authored several books focused on China's development, offering profound insights into China's reform and opening-up. His works are regarded as exemplary in telling China's story to the world.

Kuhn believes that China's economy is shifting from high-speed development, which is high GDP, to high-quality development. So he asks Yao Yang, Boya Chair Professor and the Director of the China Center for Economic Research at Peking University: what do we mean by high quality?

Yao answers the question with deep analysis, noting that high-quality development should be considered in the context of China's economic growth over the past 20 years. In the first decade of this century, Yao says, China was experiencing high-speed growth, but China's growth model was extensive expansion, focusing on exports and investment expansion. This growth model achieved great success, but since 2010, China's growth model has begun to change.

Yao further adds that internationally, overall demand slowed down due to the global financial crisis, and China's domestic economic situation was also changing, with people's income levels rising. Therefore, the shift from an extensive expansion growth model to an intensive growth model focused on domestic demand began.

In Yao's perspective, China's economic resilience is strong, which is reflected in two aspects - innovation’s role as a powerful driving force for China's economic growth, and enhancing the connection between China and the world.

Yao stresses that high-quality development focuses on technological progress. In the past, China rarely achieved its own technological advancements. But in the past decade and more, due to economic structure adjustment and emphasis on high-quality development, China has made progress in many fields, and is leading the world even in areas of AI, new energy and so on.

So Yao predicts that China's future growth will no longer be driven by investment and exports only, but also by R&D and technological progress. In addition, China's growth is also beneficial for the world, according to Yao, because when Chinese companies venture out, they will bring their advanced technologies along.