On the afternoon of March 9, 2019, the 2nd plenary meeting of the 2nd session of CPPCC was held, at which Prof. Li Daokui, Member of CPPCC, Director of the Institute for China’s Economic Practice and Thinking and Director of the Institute of Economics, School of Social Sciences, Tsinghua University, made a speech.
Li Daokui said: China is still in an important period of strategic opportunity for development, and the challenges facing China today are the growing pains by essence, and we should keep our confidence unshakable. Ten years ago, China’s economy stood on the arena of globalization. At that time, the stars on the arena welcomed us. In recent years, we keep growing too fast, so the stars feel anxiety in the transition from the old to the new, which is the judgment of “profound changes of a kind unseen in a century” in the world by the Central Government, or the Post-American Era as some American scholars defined.
Facing “growing pains”, we must, as Li Daokui thinks, be cool and open-minded to reasonably respond to challenges of the stars remaining on the arena today, take serious measures for reform, support strugglers, encourage innovators, protect responsibility undertakers, and give publicity to dedicators. We must make sustained efforts to expand our “foundation” for economic development to become stronger, better and bigger; speed up social security system reform, reduce taxes and fees on labor employment, push ahead with household registry reform and implement rural land reform. He continued: “we should make more and more couriers able to afford their first air travel, more and more housekeepers own their first apartment and more and more farmers drive their first car. When they get richer, the foundation of China’s economy will become more solid, and China’s advancement will be unstoppable.”
(By Wu Hongli, Beijing Daily, extracted from Beijing Learning Platform, with the title revised)
