Governance in China: A socialist market economy with strong State capacity

China will continuously work on striking a balance between developing its economy and promoting energy conservation and emissions reductions by rolling out more detailed plans and policies to guide targeted industries and enterprises and progressing in adopting and developing clean energy.

The market economy is mainly reflected in what role the market plays in the allocation of resources, and the economy is based on independent decision-making, investment and management decisions made by market entities although the government sector has a strong governance capacity, Ning Jizhe, vice chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China’s top economic planner, said at a the “Ambassadors Face to Face with the NDRC” event on Friday in response to an ambassador’s question over the nature of China’s market economy. 

China is the biggest trading partner for 120 countries, and the cooperation follows the international market rules, and some developed countries recognize China’s market economy, according to Ning. Even though some countries implemented restrictive measures, political forces cannot block the exchange as long as there is demand from each other’s market.

The market plays a decisive role in resource allocation, and enterprises’ decisions in independent management and investment are not made by the government, said Ning, adding that Chinese private enterprises and the individual commercial entities are fully able to make their own decisions, and that state-owned enterprises are also the mainstay of the market.

China now has a total of 140 million market entities, with 40 million business entities and 90 million individual commercial entities, data from the NDRC showed.

The fact that only a few developed countries do not recognize China’s market economy status does not affect the country’s efforts on vigorously promoting the development of the economy and the optimize the business environment. 

China’s business environment ranked 31 globally on the ease of doing business rankings according to the Doing Business Report 2020 released by the World Bank.

Ning believed that more countries and regions will learn and understand the substantive characteristics of China’s market economy and cooperate with China to jointly promote the development of global economy. 

He also said that China will continuously work on striking a balance between developing its economy and promoting energy conservation and emissions reductions by rolling out more detailed plans and policies to guide targeted industries and enterprises and progressing in adopting and developing clean energy, since ambassadors were also highly interested in the country’s follow-up plans and strategies for reaching carbon peak by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060. 

Source: Global Times, Jun 12, 2021