NANJING—Innovation and reform will be essential to China’s high-quality growth, according to experts at the 2021 China Economy Forum in mid-March.

Industrial Chain

Building a new development pattern involves strategic changes in China’s open economy, said Hong Yinxing, a professor at Nanjing University. The process of economic globalization in the new era is also the process of ending the comparative advantages of labor and resources based on resource endowments.

“It is necessary to cultivate the competitive advantages of core technologies driven by innovation,” Hong said. This requires China’s traditional export-oriented model of opening up to shift to one based on domestic demand, as the focus moves toward developing an innovation-oriented open economy.

It is vital to improve the industrial chain’s safety management capability. He Jun, a research fellow from the Institute of Industrial Economics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said that in China’s industrial management system, safety management of the industrial chain is lacking. To improve such capabilities, a brand-new safety management system and work process must be established.

Yu Rongjian, a professor from the School of Business Administration at Zhejiang University, pointed out that China has a complete set of relevant policies for industries and enterprises, but there is a lack of policy categories specifically for the industrial chain. The country needs to speed up the construction of a policy system regarding industrial chain.

Real economy

At present, China is at a historical turning point, transforming from a manufacturing giant into a manufacturing power, noted Yang Huixin, a professor from the School of Management at Shandong University. Promoting the high-quality development of the manufacturing industry is the key to breaking through the bottleneck and the only way to transition into a manufacturing power.

Entering a new stage of development, it has become necessary to promote the development of new infrastructure and digital economy technology, and to promote the high-quality development of manufacturing by deepening integration of advanced manufacturing and the modern service sector.

The real economy is the foundation of financial development, and finance is an important support for the development of the real economy, said Fan Conglai, a professor from the Business School at Nanjing University. At present, China is facing the grim reality of high financial profitability but low real economy profitability, and the profit distribution structure between the financial sector and the real economy urgently needs to be adjusted. Finance should support the transformation and upgrading of the real economy by appropriately reducing the portion of profit sharing.

Fan suggested two ways to adjust the benefit-sharing relationship between finance and the real economy: One is to reduce the price of financial services; the other is to relax the barriers to entry for the financial industry and suppress monopoly premiums through competition.

China must promote the deep integration of artificial intelligence and the real economy, and accelerate the construction of an intelligent industrial ecosystem with intelligent manufacturing as the core, said Du Chuanzhong, director of the Institute of Industrial Economics at Nankai University.

Deepening reform

Facing the realities and prominent problems of China’s economy is the key to streamlining its shift to a stage of high-quality development. Shen Kunrong, dean of the Nanjing University Business School, said that in light of the world’s major changes unseen in a century, China needs to continue to promote supply-side structural reforms, and to achieve more efficiency through deeper reforms, and more vitality through higher levels of openness.

Chen Shiyi, executive vice president of Anhui University, said that traditional regional development policies can easily lead to the contradiction between regional economic convergence and environmental imbalance, fail to take into account the win-win model of economic growth coupled with environmental improvement, and contradict the goal of high-quality economic development.

“Entering the new development stage of the 14th Five-Year Plan, we must adhere to the new development concept, the unity of balanced development and green development, and avoid the contradiction between economic convergence and environmental imbalance caused by focusing only on economic growth and ignoring environmental protection,” Chen suggested. In the future, the design and optimization of regional development policies, such as the Western Development Strategy, the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei coordinated development, and the construction of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, must be embedded with more stringent basic modules of environmental protection and green growth.

Edited by JIANG HONG