China's Five-Year Plan from 2016 to 2020, aiming at a more sustainable and balanced way of development, offers a model to be widely discussed by world economists.
The plan, setting a target of "maintaining a medium-high speed of growth," aims to double its 2010 GDP and per capita income by 2020, according to a communique issued following the Fifth Plenum of the 18th Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee.
"For China to double 2010 GDP and the per capita income of both urban and rural residents by 2020, the annual growth for the 2016-2020 period must be at least 6.5 percent," Chinese President Xi Jinping said in a statement.
As China's economy enters the "new normal," featuring slower yet healthier economic growth, it takes time and space for China to digest industrial over-capacity, restructure the economy and shift to an innovation-driven mode.
"The growth pattern is truly changing from an investment, export-led economy to a domestic consumption, services-driven one, leading to slower albeit healthier growth," said Livio Ribeiro, an economist at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in Brazil, in an interview with Xinhua.
A growth rate of less than 7 percent, or even about 6.5 percent, is an appropriate target that will still make China a major contributor to global economic growth, said Nicholas Lardy, a senior fellow with Peterson Institute for International Economics.
GREEN DEVELOPMENT
China will stick to green development and strive to improve the environment, according to the communique.
It will promote clean industrial production, low-carbon development and energy conservation to ensure sustainable growth in the next five years, the communique added.
The focus is to seek growth through economic transformation, optimizing industrial structure, improving the environment and enhancing quality and efficiency, Xi noted.
