BEIJING, Nov. 13 (Xinhua) — China recently unveiled its 13th Five-Year Plan to guide its national development from 2016 to 2020, and experts and scholars around the world have great expectations for China’s new development plan.
According to the plan unveiled at the Fifth Plenary Session of the 18th Communist Party of China Central Committee, which ended in Beijing on Oct. 29, China aims to double its gross domestic product (GDP) and per capita income of residents of 2010 by 2020, and to shift the engine of growth from investment and exports to domestic consumption, among others.
Joseph Foudy, clinical associate professor of economics at New York University, expected a long-term process to see what new opportunities China’s new five-year plan will bring for investors.
“I think in the short term the GDP could get worse, the process of rebalancing could actually be painful, but a short-term pain to make the country healthier and more vibrant in the future,” said Foudy.
Foudy believed that the financial and healthcare sectors would harbor huge opportunities as so many reforms are focused on them.
Stephen Perry, chairman of the 48 Group Club, an independent network committed to promoting links between Britain and China, said that the plan takes China through to its first centenary target of 2021 and the realization of the first stage of achieving moderate prosperity.
This ushers in an era of a managed market economy, where the modern Chinese economy is prepared and completely ready for the approach to the second centenary target of 2049, he said in a recent article.
Keith Bennett, deputy chairman of the 48 Group Club, said that the five-year plan’s goal of maintaining medium-high growth and realizing the five key ideas reflects that China’s economic development has entered a new stage, with new challenges that need to be addressed and new methods that need to be found.
Stressing the need to focus on innovation, Bennett said that China needs to make a decisive switch from a “Made in China” model to an “Invented in China” and “Designed in China” model.
Green development is closely related to innovation, the veteran China watcher said, adding that it is vital to improve peoples’ health, improve the quality of life and make development sustainable.
The combination of opening-up and sharing means that China benefits from the world and the world benefits from China. Research, development and innovation and green and sustainable development can only realize their full potential through the international division of labor and the striving towards a community of shared destiny, said Bennett.
David Gosset, founder of the Euro-China Forum, said that the 13th Five-Year Plan integrates the construction of the One Belt and One Road, the great diplomatic vision of Chinese President Xi Jinping.
The directions that Beijing decides to take will not only have a national impact, but also an international one, said Gosset.
China’s new five-year plan, focusing on sustainable economic growth and innovation, is a highly feasible project which will benefit Argentina, said Matias Carugati, head of an Argentinean consultancy named Management & Fit.
Carugati believed that “the objectives set by the Chinese authorities are ambitious but remain possible.”
“The International Monetary Fund is projecting that China will double its 2010 level of GDP between 2018 and 2020. Logically, in that period of time, it will need to double per capita income,” the leading Argentinean economist said.
“As long as China can maintain its GDP growth of 6 percent, the measures (laid out in the 13th Five-Year Plan) are clearly achievable,” said Carugati.
“The commitment by Chinese authorities to maintain the rate of growth is positive for Argentina. As China continues to increase its consumption, imports from the rest of the world will continue,” Carugati said.
“China is our second-largest commercial partner. Given that international trade is not doing well, the 13th Five-Year Plan is good news for Argentina,” he said.
The rise of China and its expanding fields of investment bring new opportunities for other countries’ economic development, said Irina Kokushkina, associate professor at the World Economy Department of St. Petersburg State University.
Under the current circumstances, the partnership with China would positively enhance the economic development of many countries in the world, she added.
China is the locomotive of world economic development, while its economic reform attracts the attention of the international community as to what kinds of changes it would bring to other areas of the Chinese society, said Nikolai Samoilov, professor of Asian and African Social Development Theory at St. Petersburg State University.
Samoilov said that a healthy Chinese economy is of great importance to the world and would definitely promote the win-win economic cooperation among countries.
“The Five-Year Plan helps where African countries need help from the Chinese government in areas of financing and also partnership,” said Michael Munyao, chairman of the Kenya-China Friendship Association.
“We need partnership between the Chinese people and the African people for technological transfer. For example, the technology to build hospitals and the equipment to maintain railway lines in Africa,” Munyao said, adding that educational partnership and more scholarships for African students are also needed.
“The Five-Year Plan would bring a lot of opportunities to Africa’s infrastructure building. I think it’s a very good direction the Chinese government is taking,” he said.