Industrial revolutions, featured by great leaps in productive forces have shaped the human society that we live in now. As a new round of technological revolution is upcoming, we are faced with the question of how to seize the opportunity and promote the well-being of the entire humanity. China offers its answer.
In September, 2023, Chinese President Xi Jinping put forward the idea of “new quality productive forces (NQPF)” for the first time during an inspection tour to China's northeast Heilongjiang province. Since then, he has elaborated on the concept at several occasions, which quickly became a buzzword, especially during this year's “two sessions” (the Plenary Sessions of the National People’s Congress and the China People’s Political Consultative Conference)，riveting the attention of global China watchers. What exactly is NQPF then? Essentially, it is about advanced productivity that is freed from traditional economic growth mode and productivity development paths, featuring high-tech, high efficiency and high quality, and in line with the new development philosophy.
As the global economy growth slows down, China also faces internal and external challenges, and it requires new engines that are distinctive from the traditional driving forces to secure high quality development. China has immeasurable potential and strong competitive edges in developing NQPF, which could become a new growth pole of the Chinese economy in the near future. In 2023, China’s added value of the high-tech manufacturing industry rose by 2.7% year-on-year, investment in high-tech industries grew by 10.3% from a year ago, and annual expenditure on research and development surpassed USD $462.28 billion, an YoY increase of 8.1%, which indicated a continuous accumulation of new momentum. The scale of China’s digital economy has grown from 16.2 trillion yuan in 2014 to 56.1 trillion yuan in 2023, and its proportion in GDP has also increased from 25.1% to 44%. Meanwhile, China's AI industry has been progressing rapidly. In 2023, the scale of the country's core AI industry reached 500 billion yuan. The market scale for AI large models was USD $2.1 billion, up 110% YoY. Developing NQPF helps foster a batch of large-scale and influential pillar industries, and also accelerates the transformation and upgrading of traditional industries, thus enhancing the resilience of the Chinese economy, and effectively upgrading and appropriately expanding China’s economic output.
China adheres to the people-centered development philosophy and endeavors to provide tangible benefits to the people. The NQPF comes with innovative management methods, improved production quality and efficiency, faster economic growth, and thus, enhances people’s well-being. In recent years, localities across China have turned to local strengths to boost their innovation capabilities, generating new industries, new business models, and new growth drivers, just as the two sessions’ emphasis on the greater efforts to cultivate NQPF in accordance with local conditions. For instance, Anhui province is home to over 60 quantum technology firms, ranking first in the country. Based on its robust innovative capacity in quantum information, the province is accelerating the development of the quantum industry. Due to its first-mover advantages in the fields of drones and low-altitude navigation, the southern metropolis of Shenzhen of Guangdong Province is expediting the development of the low-altitude economy and expects to see the industry's output exceed about USD $14 billion by 2025. By rebranding and wooing visitors to showcase its icy landscape, culture and culinary delights, Harbin, capital of Heilongjiang Province, collected a total tourism revenue of 5.9 billion yuan (USD $828 million) in 3 days when the year 2024 began, generated by 3 million visitors. Efforts to develop NQPF and embrace innovative, coordinated, green, open and shared development will finally bear fruits.
Just as President Xi said, NQPF are in itself green productive forces. If a productive force, despite its high efficiency, still causes severe damage to the environment and huge CO2 emission, it cannot be listed as NQPF. Since China has announced its goal for realizing carbon peaking in 2030 and carbon neutrality in 2060, it has made efforts to expedite the green transformation of growth models so as to make contributions to addressing climate change. Electric vehicles, solar batteries and lithium-ion batteries, categorized as China's tech-intensive and green "new three," reported a combined export value of 1.06 trillion yuan (150 billion dollars) in 2023, jumping 29.9%year on year. China's production of new energy vehicles reached 9.443 million units last year, making China the largest NEV producer for 9 consecutive years--the Shenzhen-based automaker BYD, China's EV giant, has topped the world in EV sales, overtaking Tesla for the first time in the fourth quarter of 2023.
The emphasis on the importance of NQPF begins to take effect, as Chinese economy performance in the first quarter of 2024 shows: Underpinned by solid growth in export and robust growth in high-tech industrial output, its GDP grew by 5.3%, well above market expectations, its retail sales grew by 4.7% and its total exports and imports is up by 5%. Amid a growing number of signs of strong recovery momentum in the Chinese economy, some major international financial institutions are revising up China's GDP projections for the year.
While China promotes the development of NQPF domestically, it knows that high-standard opening-up and strengthened international cooperation are their accelerators. Therefore, China will also ratchet up efforts to foster a world-class business environment that is market-oriented, law-based and internationalized, and create new strengths of a higher-level open economy. Developing NQPF will make China's import demand more diversified, which will have a multiplier effect on China's global partners, help tap new economic development potential in developing countries and enhance the resilience of the global economy. China's measures will provide other countries with more opportunities to participate in emerging industries and create a good atmosphere of cooperation for global technological progress. Grenadian government’s policies on advancing creative economy, blue economy, tourism innovation, renewable energy using, etc. are also efforts to foster NQPF and enhancing the well-being of the Grenadian people. In this regard, China is willing to share resources, markets and technological innovations with Grenada and the rest of the world to jointly vitalize the NQPF, so that they can benefit all humankind.