What Xi’s ‘high-quality development’ means

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What Xi’s ‘high-quality development’ means

Published: 26 Feb. 2024, 20:23

YOU SANG-CHUL
The author is the CEO of China Lab.

Next week, the Two Sessions, China’s major annual political events, will be held. One of the keywords is “high-quality development.” Bloomberg has reported, however, that investors around the world are wondering what China means by that. It is still ambiguous. The problem is that Chinese President Xi Jinping keeps repeating this. The phrase first appeared during the 19th Party Congress in 2017, and Xi stressed high-quality development 65 times in 2022 and 128 times last year.

After mentioning the phase twice in his New Year’s address last year, the theme for the Politburo group study on January 31 was the “solid promotion of high-quality development.” The phrase refers to a development strategy of the Xi Jinping era aiming to differentiate itself from the Deng Xiaoping era.

The contradiction of China during the Deng era was that productivity was low and people’s demands were not met, so Deng pushed for growth and claimed, “Development is the firm way to go.” Xi was seeking to resolve poverty.

He views China’s contradictions differently. China’s economic growth so far has resolved poverty. Now the challenge is how to make life more decent for the general public. Therefore, Xi modified the phrase, stressing that “high-quality” development was the firm way to go in the new era. The new era is the Xi Jinping era. In other words, he intends to make people’s lives “beautiful” through high-quality development.

In the early days of Xi’s power, China’s rapid growth was over, so he declared that medium-speed growth would be the new normal. That effectively marked the end of the era of GDP-oriented growth. Local governments no longer set over-the-top growth targets. What Xi wants is for people in all parts of China to be equally prosperous without destroying the environment. What reflected this wish was the “New Development Philosophy” he presented in 2015.

It includes five concepts: innovative, cooperative, green, open, and shared development. Innovation means technological innovation, and cooperation refers to the elimination of gaps between urban and rural areas. The green means the environment, while openness denotes the use of both the domestic and foreign markets, and sharing connotes common prosperity.

To realize these goals, Xi proposed the “high-quality” focus. What he emphasizes the most among the five is technological innovation. Xi decided that the modernization of socialism or the Chinese dream cannot be realized without achieving self-reliance on cutting-edge technologies such as semiconductors.

In other words, Xi’s “high-quality development” signifies his determination to break away from the United States and attain China’s technological independence.