The 13th Five Year Plan and its challenges
- By Niranjan Sahoo
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E-mail China.org.cn, November 6, 2015
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Quality matters [By Gu Peili/China.org.cn] |
As Chinese planners and policymakers get down to the last lap of wrapping up crucial 13th Five-Year Development Plan, the world is eagerly waiting to see the final shape of the document. The global curiosity has attended a heightened degree owing to the country's recent economic performances and the ongoing turbulences in stock markets. Beyond this, the real reason for the 13th Five-Year Plan getting so much of attention is that the key document will bear the imprint of Xi Jinping's vision and mission coinciding with the celebration of the first Centenary Goal in 2021.
While the "planned economy" model may have come a cropper world over as economic activities have turned mostly private sector driven where states have forsaken their commanding heights in economic policy making, China has managed to duck the global trend. Of course, this is not to mean the country is still following the planning model of the Soviet era. With their ears to the ground, especially the developments in 1980s that saw the collapse of the Soviet model, the Chinese political leadership have gone on refining and restructuring the old planning body and its mission and focus to make it relevant to the changing reality. By creating a new planning arm, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) and tasking it to navigate between state-led developmentalism and market-led reforms, the Chinese leadership successfully saved planning as a state instrument to promote orderly growth and development.
Beyond institutional re-engineering, what has given credibility to planning exercise is the accuracy of its projections and measurements. For instance, the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-2015) which had set many ambitious goals such as 7 percent growth, income distribution, urbanisation goals, have easily been met.
The relevance and effectiveness of planning exercise has been preserved by making it scientific and participatory. Involving thousands of career specialists, experienced policy makers and top notch professionals sourced from several dozen departments and specialized units, the planning activities carried out by NDRC meet required rigours and methodological standards. In short, China's planning model demonstrated by vertical central command and horizontal blocks of regional competition that seamlessly absorbs demands of regional autonomy and central authority while at the same time lending space to a dynamic process of local experiments, central planning, regional and sub-national competition, and market regulation, has no parallel in the world.
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