China aims for sustained, healthy growth in the five years to 2025

BEIJING: China is targeting sustained and healthy economic development in the five years to 2025, with an emphasis on a higher quality of growth, the official Xinhua news agency said on Thursday, citing the ruling Communist Party's Central Committee.

President Xi Jinping and members of the Central Committee, the largest of the ruling party's elite decision-making bodies, met behind closed doors from Monday to lay out the 14th five-year plan, a blueprint for economic and social development.

China's external environment "is getting more complicated", the agency said, adding, "There is a significant increase in instabilities and uncertainties."


However, the country's development was still in a period of important strategic opportunities, despite new challenges, it said.

It added that China aims to boost its gross domestic product (GDP) per person to the level of moderately developed countries by 2035, while GDP is due to top 100 trillion yuan ($15 trillion) in 2020.

China will also deepen reforms and let market forces play a decisive role in resources allocation, the agency said.

China will promote a "dual circulation" model, make self-sufficiency in technology a strategic pillar for development, move to develop and urbanise regions, and combine efforts to expand domestic demand with supply-side reforms, it added.

The "dual circulation" strategy, first proposed by Xi in May, envisages that China's next phase of development will depend mainly on "domestic circulation" or an internal cycle of production, distribution and consumption, backed by domestic technological innovation.