In the face of an increasingly turbulent world, China will employ “strategic proactiveness” as it addresses growing risks and challenges, senior officials said at a Friday press conference detailing the country’s priorities under its next five-year plan.
With the next half-decade regarded as a critical phase for the party to achieve its long-term benchmark of “basically realising socialist modernisation” by 2035, China will “take historical initiative” to ensure progress towards that goal, said Han Wenxiu, deputy director of the party’s economic affairs office.
“While the world is undergoing accelerated changes unseen in a century, with profound adjustments in the balance of international forces, China possesses many favourable factors for proactively managing the international space and shaping its external environment.”
Calling the periodic national blueprint a “political advantage” that other countries admire, the officials vowed to “take economic development as the central task”, a phrase signifying a firm pro-growth stance that was not used in the plan’s previous iteration.
