BEIJING: China’s top leadership has outlined steps to build up the nation’s competitiveness in the financial sector, highlighting the need to strengthen financial regulation across the board, improve the financial system and optimize the sector’s services while preventing and defusing risks.
The two-day, tone-setting central financial work conference, which concluded on Tuesday in Beijing, underscored that the nation will always maintain the prudent nature of its monetary policies, with a greater focus on conducting cross-cyclical and countercyclical adjustments.
Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, delivered key remarks at the conference, laying out plans for the financial sector for the current and coming period. In addition to Xi, who is also Chinese president and chairman of the Central Military Commission, other members of the Party’s core leadership also attended the meeting.
China first convened a national conference on the financial sector in 1997, with the most recent conference, the fifth, held in 2017.
The financial sector is the lifeblood of a nation’s economy and a crucial component of a country’s core competitiveness, according to a summary of the conference.
While highlighting the strong support from the financial system for the overall development of China’s economy and society beginning in 2012, policymakers said various contradictions and problems in the financial sector have intertwined with and influenced each other, with some problems remaining prominent and many hidden economic and financial risks persisting.
They pointed out that the quality of financial services and the role of these services in helping the real economy have room to improve, with financial irregularities and corruption problems remaining and financial regulation and governance having a lack of strength.
The meeting stressed the need to uphold and strengthen the Party’s across-the-board leadership over financial work, saying that China must target the building of a nation with a strong financial sector, promote the sector’s high-quality development and deepen its supply-side structural reform.
The financial sector must provide high-quality services for economic and social development, including steps to create an enabling monetary and financial environment and strengthen top-notch financial services to major strategies, key sectors and weak links, the summary said.
More financial resources should be channeled to promoting science-technology innovation, advanced manufacturing, green development, and micro, small and medium-sized enterprises, it added.
The policymakers called for strong financial support for strategies regarding innovation-driven development, regional coordinated development and ensuring national food and energy security. –The Daily Mail-China Daily news exchange item
