Achievements, Problems and Direction of China’s Reform and Opening

ABSTRACT

China has made brilliant achievements in the past 40 years, but at the same time there are also many thought-provoking questions emerged in China, which reveals to us that we should define clearly the correct direction of the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics. We must persistently take the realization, safeguard and development of the fundamental interests of the immense majority of the people as our starting point and ultimate goal of promoting reform to ensure the gains of development benefit all our people in a fairer way. We must uphold and promote China’s basic economic system with public ownership dominating and various economic components coexisting so as to lay a solid foundation for the fundamental interests of the working people. We must actively practice the new development concepts of innovation, coordination, greenness and openness to create conditions for benefiting the majority of the people. We must be committed to building the Communist Party of China, highlighting the working class vanguard character of the Party, strengthening the leadership of the Party, and defending and promoting the interests of the working people.

KEYWORDS:

• People-centered development
• institutional basis for the interests of the people
• development concept benefiting the people

Acknowledgements

This article is translated by Li Shuqing at the China Agricultural University (Yantai).

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Xuangong Wu is a professor and doctorial tutor at the Institute of Economic Research, Xiamen University, China, and a researcher at the Collaborative Innovation Center for China Economy. He specializes in the ownership and property theory, enterprise institution and reform of the economic system. He published Reform of the Socialist Ownership Structure (in Chinese, Zhejiang People’s Publishing House, 1994), and A Comparison of the Marxist Property Theory and the Western Modern Property Theory (in Chinese, Economic Science Press, 2000).

Notes

1. Privatization advocates are keen on the reform of mixed ownership of state-owned enterprises, but they are panicked when they hear that the private enterprises can also be mixed reformed, as if the end of the world is coming. In fact, it is commonplace for the state to hold shares or to be the controlling shareholder in private enterprises in capitalist countries.

2. Marx pointed out, “The crux of the bourgeois society is precisely that there has been no conscious social regulation of production from the beginning” (Marx and Engels 1972, 369).

3. Xi Jinping made a remark at the symposium on August 21, 2015 with representatives of non-communists, “The final standard of judgment for the success of our reform and development is whether the people have enjoyed the fruits of reform and development” (People Net 2015b).