disniyg

[disniyg]

High-level opening up enables high-quality economic development

In the past year, China's economy has taken a recovery curve with a positive trend under continuous pressure, and the main expected goals of economic and social development are expected to be successfully achieved. Looking ahead to the new year, China's economic development still has many favorable conditions and supporting factors. Among them, the dynamic advantages brought by the continued deepening of reform and opening up, especially the high-level opening up that enables high-quality development, deserves attention.

China's adherence to opening up is an important force in promoting economic globalization. Opening up is a distinctive symbol of contemporary China. The report of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China regards the promotion of high-level opening up as an important part of "accelerating the construction of a new development pattern and focusing on promoting high-quality development." As General Secretary Xi Jinping emphasized during his inspection in Guangdong in April last year: "China's reform and opening-up policy will remain unchanged for a long time, and it will never close the door to opening up by itself." Since entering the new era, the Central Economic Work Conference has made important arrangements for opening up to the outside world many times. The first meeting of the 20th Central Financial and Economic Commission emphasized that "adhering to open cooperation and not working behind closed doors"; the 2023 Central Economic Work Conference listed "expanding high-level opening up" as one of the nine tasks of economic work this year, which further highlights the importance of high-level opening up to the outside world for high-quality economic development.

Economic globalization is still moving forward in twists and turns, and expansion and deepening go hand in hand. Affected by the epidemic, in 2020, the proportion of global goods and services imports and exports to global GDP and the transnational index of multinational corporations were 52.1% and 60.5% respectively, both of which were the lowest in the past 15 years. The process of economic globalization has recovered actively after the epidemic, and there are many opportunities in the international environment. Global trade has grown faster than global GDP, and global trade (goods plus services) has rapidly increased to 60.7% of global GDP, the highest point in the past 15 years. The transnational index of multinational corporations has also steadily increased to 61.7%. These data show that the global division of labor system is still expanding and deepening. In this process, digital technology has provided important new impetus. The vigorous development of economic globalization is mainly due to the contribution of digital technology. In the field of digital economy, digital multinational corporations are the multinational corporations with the fastest degree of transnationalization, and digital-driven service trade has accounted for more than half of service trade.

The environment for foreign investment continues to improve and its attractiveness has increased. From January to September 2023, 37,814 new foreign-invested enterprises were established nationwide, a year-on-year increase of 32.4%; the actual use of foreign capital was 919.97 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 8.4%. This phenomenon should be analyzed in depth and correctly understood. At China's current stage of development, the change in the proportion of foreign investment is affected by multiple factors. First, the change in the relative competitiveness of domestic and foreign-funded enterprises. Many multinational companies feel that it is difficult to compete with China's leading enterprises. This trend has long existed. In the past ten years, there have been cases in many fields such as home appliances and communication equipment where foreign companies have felt the strong competitiveness of Chinese companies. In recent years, the competitiveness of domestic enterprises has been further strengthened, and both domestic and foreign-funded enterprises have accelerated their advances and retreats. Second, China's per capita income and labor costs have increased significantly compared with previous years. Foreign-funded enterprises that entered China due to low labor costs in the early years need to re-arrange their layout. Third, the global layout adjustment is affected by the current complex and uncertain international environment. Even with the above changes, multinational companies, especially some of the companies that have moved out, still feel the broad prospects of the Chinese market and the comprehensive competitive advantages of Made in China in comparison. Some companies have begun to increase orders to my country and even consider moving back. What is more important is that my country has continuously opened up the Chinese market by reducing the negative list, continuously optimized the business environment, and various local departments have launched a policy "combination punch" to stabilize foreign investment. More and more multinational companies have renewed their longer-term agreements with China and deeply embedded in China's industrial chain and innovation chain.

As my country's basic national policy, opening up to the outside world has been given new connotations in the new era. High-level opening up is not a return to the comfort zone of the past, but to seek cooperation and development in fierce competition. There is no need to look back, but to look forward.

Horizontal division of labor is the main focus, from complementary cooperation to competitive cooperation. The opening up based on horizontal division of labor is fundamentally different from the traditional cooperation of complementary manufacturing products under the vertical division of labor system, which has changed from mutual support to competitive cooperation. For multinational companies, China is a partner and an important market, and Chinese companies are competitors, which requires us to look at the competitive landscape with a normal mind. Especially in the construction of a modern industrial system led by scientific and technological innovation, the development of high-tech industries is mostly horizontal division of labor, which requires us to increase our efforts to forge our strengths, open up innovation to make up for our weaknesses, and self-reliance to enhance original innovation capabilities, so as to drive the continuous improvement of the manufacturing level.

It is of great significance to participate in the global industrial chain value chain division. China is not only a participant and beneficiary of global industrial chain and supply chain cooperation, but also a firm defender and builder. In the past, we could only join the global industrial chain value chain built by other multinational companies. Now we have become a country with the most complete industrial categories. We can produce products in the global division of labor system and in the domestic full-chain system. However, "doing everything we can do" is not the best option. For China, stability, security and efficiency should be considered in a coordinated manner between the independent industrial system and the global industrial division of labor. On the one hand, cutting-edge technology often belongs to a technology market with a monopoly nature, which is different from the situation that the technology introduced by my country in the past has a "competitive market"; on the other hand, my country also faces many non-economic obstacles, and the difficulty of technology introduction has increased. Therefore, in the balance between technological division of labor and independent innovation, we must move towards scientific and technological self-reliance and high-level security. It should also be noted that global technological cooperation is not just our passive import of foreign technology. China is already a major technology exporter. From the perspective of the global industrial chain, we are already the largest net exporter of technology when calculating the R&D investment content in export products. Now we can not only exchange market for technology, but also exchange technology for market. This stems from the global competitiveness brought by my country's large manufacturing scale and high R&D content in its export manufacturing industry.

Open source is a new form of global scientific and technological cooperation to promote development. In the digital age and the intelligent age, open source is an inevitable trend for global scientific and technological cooperation to promote development. At present, mainstream big data software in the field of technology is open source, and the development of cloud computing and big data has also benefited from open source. Although the current leaders of general large models of artificial intelligence still adopt a closed source model, successors are likely to adopt an open source model to compete with them. With the development of digital technology and intelligent technology, it is difficult to form a self-closed-loop system for global competition in the face of massive demands for data, computing power and investment. Judging from the current domestic and international trends, we have reason to expect that high-level opening up will inject stronger impetus into China's economic development, based on the new trend of industry participation in the global horizontal division of labor, promote the stable development of the global industrial chain and value chain, promote international scientific and technological cooperation and joint innovation, and promote the continuous improvement of domestic technology level and industrial competitiveness. Empower the high-quality development of China's economy with high-level opening up, and promote the effective improvement of quality and reasonable growth of China's economy.