BEIJING, July 17,
2024 /CNW/ -- In the National Museum of China, there is a special collection of 109
official seals. The seals, which are from Binhai New Area in Tianjin Municipality, were
scrapped in 2014 after the local government set up an
administrative examination and approval bureau and incorporated
hundreds of examination and approval units into one department,
replacing 109 official seals with one official seal.
In 2014, though the concept of building a socialist market
economy had been introduced more than two decades earlier, doing
business remained a challenging endeavor. A lawmaker from Tianjin
Municipal People's Congress revealed that a single investment
project, from acquiring land to completing all administrative
approval procedures, required more than 30 government approvals and
over 100 seals. The entire process took a minimum of 272 working
days.
The 109 seals displayed in the national museum demonstrated
China's determination to deepen
institutional reform. Over the years, to facilitate businesses,
China's State Council has canceled
or delegated to lower-level authorities the power of administrative
approval for over 1,000 items and slashed the number of investment
items subject to central government approval by over 90
percent.
Why deepening reform matters
China launched reform and
opening up in 1978. Over the past 46 years, China has transformed from a poor and
underdeveloped economy into the world's second-largest economy.
"Reform and opening up is a major reason why China is able to catch up with the times,"
Chinese President Xi Jinping said at a symposium in 2023. He added,
"To promote Chinese modernization, we must further comprehensively
deepen reform and opening up, continuously liberate and develop
social productive forces, and unleash and enhance social
vitality."
China kicked off the third
plenary session of the 20th Central Committee of the Communist
Party of China in Beijing on Monday. The meeting will focus on
further comprehensively deepening reform and advancing Chinese
modernization.
Wang Chunguang, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social
Sciences, said that China has now
entered a "deep water" zone in its reform process, facing more
complex and urgent tasks than before, such as the diminishing
effectiveness of previous reforms, an unclear path of future
reform, and shifting international relations. Failing to address
the various challenges in society, the economy, culture and
politics via further reform, China's modernization will be significantly
constrained.
Fan Weiqing, an associate
professor at Wuhan University,
said that as a new round of sci-tech revolution and industrial
transformation takes shape around the world, and as sci-tech
competition becomes fiercer, deepening reform is also vital for
China's technological innovation,
which is "decisive" for the country's future.
"To resolve the series of outstanding contradictions and
challenges facing China's further
development, we must deepen reform and opening up," said Xi. He
attaches great importance to deepening reform. One year after he
took the helm as the general secretary of the Communist Party of
China Central Committee in 2012, the central government adopted a
decision to comprehensively deepen reform, with the goals of
improving and developing the socialist system with Chinese
characteristics and modernizing China's governance system and capacity.
How is China deepening
reform?
Since then, China's leadership
has put forward a road map for deepening overall reform, and the
country has also rolled out over 3,000 reform plans covering Party
and state institutional reform, rural land reform, state-owned
enterprise reform, financial reform, green transformation and
medical system reform.
Of all the reforms, economic reform is the central focus. Xi has
advocated letting the market play the "decisive" role in resource
allocation, which is a strong signal of policy adjustment, as the
word "decisive" was "basic" in the previous official statement.
Under Xi's instruction, China
established a private economy development bureau to assist private
enterprises, promoted financial reforms to facilitate financing for
private enterprises, advanced state-owned enterprise (SOE) reform
to further improve the modern enterprise system, and implemented
the system of a negative list for market access, allowing entry
into areas not explicitly prohibited by the list.
The results of the reforms have been remarkable. A three-year
action plan for SOE reform (2020-2022) converted over 165,000 SOEs
into limited liability companies, or companies limited by shares,
and some 38,000 SOEs established boards of directors. From 2012 to
2023, the number of private enterprises in China more than quadrupled, and the number of
private enterprises as a proportion of the total number of
enterprises increased from less than 80 percent to over 92
percent.
A World Bank report released in 2020 stated that due to its
steady and strong reform, China
has witnessed an unprecedented improvement in its business
environment, and it was included among the top 10 global reformers
for two years in a row.
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2024-07-16/Why-is-deepening-reform-so-important-for-China--1vhwv3kKVkk/p.html
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