Xi Jinping deliberately skipped GDP target during epic congress speech, aide admits

The omission of a GDP target by Chinese President Xi Jinping during his 3½-hour speech at the opening of the Communist Party congress last week was a deliberate move to tell the country that quality of growth rather than speed now matters most for the world’s second largest economy, an economic aide to Xi said on Thursday.

“China’s growth has shifted from a high-speed growth phase to a high-quality growth phase,” Yang Weimin, a deputy director at the Office of the Central Leading Group on Financial and Economic Affairs, said a press conference in Beijing. “What is the most pressing problem? It is the issue of quality of growth,” he said.

China’s government has stressed the need for more sustainable growth, ensuring that a wider section of society benefits from economic expansion and that development does not come at the cost of higher pollution and other environmental degradation.

Yang added that Xi’s silence on GDP targets for 2021, the 100th anniversary of the foundation of the Chinese Communist Party, or 2035 when China targets the nation’s “basic modernisation”, was intended to urge the party apparatus to better implement new ideas about growth and to focus on issues of “imbalance and inadequate development”.

The press conference, a day after China’s new leadership line-up was named, was held to explain the policy implications of the 19th Party Congress, which enshrined Xi’s name in the party constitution and cemented his grip on power.

Yang did not specify whether China would drop its practice of setting annual growth targets.