Reform, opening-up key to development

Mobilize people

People are the main acting subjects of reform. To comprehensively deepen reform and opening-up, China must mobilize the enthusiasm of people from all walks of life. It should combine top-down design with bottom-up grassroots innovation, and encourage and support people across the board to participate in reform.

Opening-up remains the key to advancing reform and promoting development. China should take major measures to advance high-standard opening-up to form an important driving force to facilitate the deepening of reform.

To adapt to the general trend of the accelerating evolution of "profound changes unseen in a century", China must firmly promote high-standard opening-up with free trade as the main component, so as to facilitate its reform and development and help it stand out in international cooperation and competition. In this sense, opening-up is the biggest element promoting development, reform and security in China.

China must achieve greater market openness. Expanding market opening-up remains an important driving force for China's economic restructuring and upgrading. For example, from 2012 to 2022, China's consumer goods imports more than doubled, which contributed to the transformation and upgrading of its consumption structure.

In the next few years, against the backdrop of an expected weak expansion of global market demand, further liberalization of China's market will mean more impetus injected into the world economy.

China should also resort to institutional opening-up to push forward institutional reform. Institutional opening-up is directly related to institutional reform. China's voluntary application to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, for example, can help it introduce high-standard international economic and trade rules, and to pressure domestic deepening of reform by dovetailing with international rules and standards.

To carry out institutional reform, China should comprehensively outline the role of competition policy to ensure that domestic and foreign investors, and private and State-owned enterprises, are all treated equally in terms of access to production factors, market access, corporate operation, government procurement and bidding.

The country should make major breakthroughs in free trade through unilateral opening-up.

President Xi Jinping, in his keynote speech at the opening ceremony of the 3rd Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation last month, announced eight major steps the country will take to promote the Belt and Road Initiative.

These are important measures for the country's proactive opening-up. China can formulate and implement country-specific and sector-specific policies for unilateral opening-up to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to make breakthroughs in the promotion of free trade between both sides.

As the world economy faces a possible "lost decade", China's important breakthroughs in promoting further reform and opening-up will help it achieve sustainable economic growth in the medium and long term, and at the same time, contribute enormously to global economic growth and rebalancing, while playing an important role in pushing forward a new round of economic globalization.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

The writer is president of Haikou, Hainan province-based China Institute for Reform and Development.