China will deepen economic and financial reforms and further open its markets to foreign investors as it looks to move from high-speed to high-quality growth, President Xi Jinping said on Wednesday.
China will push ahead with market-oriented reforms of its foreign exchange rate as well as its financial system, and let the market play a decisive role in the allocation of resources, Xi said.
“China’s open door will not be closed, it will be only be opened wider,” he said.
The government will “clean up rules and practices that hinder a unified market and fair competition, support development of private firms and stimulate vitality of all types of market entities,” Xi said, while pledging to further open China’s services sector to foreign investors.
However, while expressing support for market reform and private firms, Xi also called for stronger, bigger state firms of the world’s second largest economic country.
The government will “promote strengthening, improvement and expansion of state capital, (and) effectively prevent loss of state assets, deepen reform of state-owned enterprises, development a mixed-ownership economy and cultivate globally competitive world-class firms,” Xi said.
Xi’s comments reiterated a long-standing pledge by party leaders to give a greater role to free-market forces to improve efficiency and put the economy on a more sustainable growth path.
But as Xi gears up for his second five-year term, foreign business executives and analysts increasingly believe market liberalisation is seen as secondary to his state-centred approach to economic policy and his focus on stability.
Other painful reforms that many economists say are needed have also moved slowly under Xi. They include overhauling China’s bloated and debt-laden state sector, fixing the fiscal system to tackle local government debt and bringing in new property taxes to ward off housing bubbles.