The Two Sessions: Driving forward the Five-Year Plan
- By Tim Collard
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E-mail China.org.cn, March 16, 2016
"Coordination" is essentially a matter of bringing resources to where they are needed, a topic discussed at length during the "Two Sessions." It has long been recognized that China's methods of financing the local government and local enterprises are in need of reform. Actions will be taken to ensure a thoroughgoing reform of state financing, meaning that finances will be directed towards established needs, rather than depending on enterprises being located where funding happens to be available, or who happens to control such financing. Coordination also involves integration of urban and rural populations, involving a reform of the "hukou" system, so that farmers in the urban penumbra have better access to public services in social security, healthcare and education.
"Green development" is an endeavor to counter one of China's major disadvantages in the rapidity of her development. Industrialization in Western countries took a much longer time, and the serious environmental problems it engendered had to be sorted out over a considerable period of time - it was only in the 1950s that serious action was taken to dispel the famous "London fogs." Future industrial development must be sustainable, paying attention to the limitation of China's natural resources, the need to control pollution, and the need to slow down - and if possible reverse - the deterioration of China's ecological system. This is particularly relevant in the case of those provinces - especially in the northeast - which are in the process of transition from heavy industry to the hi-tech and service industries.
"Opening-up" has been a central part of China's economic program since 1979. However, it can still be enhanced and expanded. The "Belt and Road" program is an important part of that. But, there is a sense in which the opportunities presented by China's new growth have not yet been adequately advertised to the outside world. In the 1980s, economic engagement in China tended to come largely through Hong Kong; in the 1990s it was mainly through the booming regions along the East Coast.The requirement for the 21st century is to engage the whole of China, to involve all of the natural resources and the human capital of inner China with the outside world.
This is an important point, which brings us on to the last of the five central pillars of the development program, namely, "sharing." At first glance this may look like a rather anodyne injunction to imprecise cooperation and a general sharing of resources, but in China it has a special connotation. It is well known that the spectacular economic growth of China over the last thirty-five years has benefited the country strongly but somewhat unevenly. It was inevitable that the southern region and the east coast should be the main engine of growth in the initial period of reform and opening up, and, indeed, parts of that region have become very prosperous. However, a stable and unified China depends on broadly-based prosperity spread across the entire country.
The writer is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit:
http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/timcollard.htm
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