China puts focus on development agenda amid ‘new challenges and conflicts’

Name: What happened at the Chinese Communist Party’s major policy meeting, the fifth plenum?
Uploaded: 2020-11-03T15:30:19.000Z
Duration: 3 min 5 s
Description: What happened at the Chinese Communist Party’s major policy meeting, the fifth plenum?

State media releases full text of five-year development proposal and report delivered by Xi Jinping at plenary meeting last week

Both stress that Beijing must keep a clear mind as the world faces ‘most profound changes in a century’

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President Xi Jinping addresses a plenary session of the Central Committee in Beijing on Thursday. Photo: Xinhua via AP

William Zheng

Published: 11:30pm, 3 Nov 2020Updated: 11:35pm, 3 Nov 2020

China can overcome challenges brought by an uncertain external environment by focusing on its development agenda, putting more emphasis on high-quality growth and investing in technology and innovation, Beijing said in documents released on Tuesday.

State media published the full text of a development proposal for the next five years adopted by the Communist Party’s Central Committee and a report delivered by President Xi Jinping at a plenary meeting of the committee last week.

The proposal – a summary of China’s 14th five-year plan to 2025 – said that while China faced “profound and complex changes in its development environment” it had “attained decisive achievements in securing a victory in building a moderately prosperous society in all respects”.

In the report, Xi said China would officially declare it had achieved the goal of turning the country into a moderately prosperous society in the first half of 2021 after a systemic assessment.

03:05

What happened at the Chinese Communist Party’s major policy meeting, the fifth plenum?

The documents were published on the eve of the US presidential election. Chinese officials have refrained from commenting on the race between President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden in recent weeks but called on the US to abandon its “Cold War mentality” and return to dialogue to repair strained ties between the two countries.

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