SHANGHAI—At the 4th Annual Conference of China Urban Development and Industrial Economics and the concurrent Seminar on Innovative City, Vital Dynamic Industries and High-Quality Development of the Chinese Economy, experts shed light on how to steadily promote China’s high-quality development.

At present, China’s economy is faced with triple pressures from demand contraction, supply shock, and weakening expectations, which urgently requires the academic community to provide a solution. Huang Qunhui, director of the Institute of Economics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said that effective investment is a necessary choice to deal with the triple pressures. To achieve investment effectiveness, we need to adhere to supply-side structural reform as the main line, domestic economic circulation as the mainstay, and the market’s decisive role in resource allocation.

Huang said that effective investment must be supported by market entities, and integration of micro-policies with reform and opening up policies is needed to stimulate market vitality. Micro-policies must correctly understand the relationship between industrial policy and competition policy, and create a more optimized business environment for market players.

Over the past four decades, China’s rapid economic growth has benefited from the country’s participation in global trade and division of labor. How can China release its economic development potential on institutional levels and maintain steady economic growth?

Zhang Jun, dean of the School of Economics at Fudan University, believes that the key is to fully leverage entrepreneurship and enhance the vitality of technological innovation and total factor productivity. To this end, we need to further deepen reform and opening up, and speed up structural transformation. It is also important to remove institutional obstacles to the formation of a fair and effective market economy, and allow the market to play a decisive role in resource allocation.

Yin Desheng, dean of the School of Economics at East China Normal University, said that in recent years, with the financial system’s continuously deepening reform, China has continued to increase investment in innovation. Strategic national scientific and technological strength has continued to improve, and economic growth’s internal driving force has continued to grow, giving China’s manufacturing industry an edge.

As China signs regional trade agreements with neighboring countries, regional infrastructure networks and future trade and investment networks are also constantly being optimized, Yin noted.

“Under the combined effect of these multiple factors, the status of China’s manufacturing industry in the global value chain will be further enhanced,” Yin said.

Currently, international exchanges are interrupted, trade protectionism is on the rise, and the geopolitical landscape is undergoing profound changes, which will definitely have a profound impact on the development of cities and industries, said Yuan Wen, president of Shanghai Normal University. In this context, innovation has become a key variable that affects urban development and stimulates industrial vitality.

Zhou Zhenhua, dean of the Shanghai Institute for Global City, noted that cities actually have two lifelines: the infrastructure system that maintains residents’ life and production, and external network connectivity. Compared with traditional understandings of the urban lifeline, the lifeline established by external network connectivity is more complex, and even more important.

Shen Kunrong, dean of Nanjing University Business School, believes that promoting high-quality urban development requires the convergence of high-end factors of production.

“In the new round of development, we must break down institutional barriers between urban and rural areas and eliminate differences in public services between urban and rural areas,” Shen said. In particular, it is necessary to promote high-quality economic development by realizing the flow of high-end factors of production between urban and rural areas.