BEIJING — China’s 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-2020) on National Economic and Social Development will not only meet its own development demand, but also have a positive impact on the rest of the world, overseas experts have said.
The document, adopted at the Fifth Plenary Session of the 18th Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee which ended on Oct 29, sets guidelines and targets for the next five years. It highlights the ideas of innovation, coordination, green development, opening up and sharing to fulfill its goals.
The next five-year period, the 13th since the founding of new China in 1949, was described as a decisive stage for building a moderately prosperous society by 2020 in the eight-chapter proposal.
China’s development benefits world economy
The rise of China and its expanding investment fields bring new opportunities for other countries’ economic development, said Irina Kokushkina, associate professor at the World Economy Department of Russia’s St. Petersburg State University.
Under current circumstances, the partnership with China would positively enhance the economic development of many countries in the world, she added.
Driss Groui, a Moroccan economic expert and professor at the ESCA Business School in Morocco, told Xinhua that the Communist Party of China is a ruling party of strategic insight, whose five-year plan will not only help China become an economic power, but also help occupy a more important position in the global political arena.
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 Chinese society, said leading Russian sinologist Nikolai Samoilov, professor of Asian and African Social Development Theory at St. Petersburg State University in Russia.
“A healthy Chinese economy is of great importance to the world and would definitely promote the win-win economic cooperation among countries in the world,” Samoilov said.
Samoilov said the Fifth Plenary Session of the CPC’s 18th Central Committee has addressed a series of extremely important developments in Chinese society and uncovered new future prospects. In recent decades, such plenary sessions have played a major role in contributing to China’s large-scale reforms and adding impetus to China’s development.
China has contributed around 40 percent of global income growth over the past five years, said James Laurenceson, deputy director of the Australia-China Relations Institute at the University of Technology Sydney.
“The IMF forecasts that China’s economy will be 44 percent bigger in 2020 than now. This means that China will remain the leading source of global growth in the coming five years,” he said.
Developing countries welcome China’s growth
The expectation is that the Chinese economy will remain stable despite the global economic volatility, said Munene Macharia, a scholar and lecturer on International Relations at United States International University in Kenya.
“As China has become the economic engine of the world, a stimulated and robust Chinese economy in the next five-year period therefore will also stimulate the robustness of other economies,” the professor said.
Moreover, China’s anti-corruption cause will be a good example for African countries that have been troubled by the same problem, he said, saying that Kenya and other African countries could learn from China’s anti-corruption efforts.
The 13th Five-Year Plan emphasizes maintaining steady economic growth in the next five years, which is important to China, as well as other developing countries in the world, said Mohammed Gahli, professor of international law at Cadi Ayad University in Morocco.
In the future, China will tap greater potential in cooperation with African countries, said Abdulrahman Mabdur, an Algerian international strategic management expert.
It is expected that China-Africa cooperation will reach a higher level as China treats African countries in an equal, mutually beneficial and win-win manner, he added.
