A waiting world
- By Mei Xinyu
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E-mail Beijing Review, November 20, 2013
Many innovative practices China created in attracting foreign investment have become examples for other countries to follow. To end some extreme practices, such as providing "super-national treatment" to foreign companies, does not mean China will reject previous methods. On the contrary, China will continue to abolish unnecessary administrative approval, expand market access, provide national treatment to foreign investors and improve public services. With the completion of industrialization, industrial upgrades and urbanization will offer broad space for both domestic and foreign investors.
That China expands market access to foreign investors does not mean it guarantees profits, but only offers more opportunities for free competition. It is the investors' competitiveness that decides whether they will make profits or be washed out of the market.
Public welfare
In China's process of rapidly improving people's well-being, the welfare crisis of Europe will not be repeated.
As an inevitable outcome of reform, China's wage levels keep rising. The Chinese Government is committed to ensuring that all its people share in the country's development, and with the ongoing rise in wage levels, the country will stop using low-income workers that reduce manufacturing costs as an advantage internationally.
The goal of reform is to share the country's achievements with all people, although this goal has to be realized step by step. One of the essential features of socialism is common prosperity, while social welfare and social security are among the means to share achievements of reform and development and realize common prosperity.
In a poll taken by Global Times before the plenary session, 79.1 percent of participants said they expected "reform of the social welfare and social security systems," and 54.7 percent expected "reform of income distribution systems." This result indicates that emphasizing the goal of common prosperity is in line with public opinion.
However, every coin has two sides, as does China's resident income growth and improvements in welfare. On one hand, it helps to expand effective demand and the scale of China's domestic market and then enhance the attraction of that market; on the other hand, excessively high incomes will damage international competitiveness of a country. We can learn this lesson from the heavily indebted countries in Europe. Therefore we should not have excessive expectations about the level of social welfare and social security.
The communiqué says that there would be an improvement in the system and mechanism promoting employment and entrepreneurship, formation of an income distribution structure that is reasonable and orderly and establishment of a social security system that is fairer and more sustainable. This indicates that the top leadership is aware of the risks and committed to realizing sustainable development.
In the decade under Hu Jintao, the Chinese Government had already begun the process of income distribution and adopted some of these measures. The measures adopted in the last decade centered on getting rid of poverty and remarkable progress has been made there. In the coming decade, government measures will focus on expanding the middle-income group. What is most important is creating job opportunities with reasonable incomes, not just raising social welfare and security benefits.
The author is a researcher at the Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation, Ministry of Commerce.
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