Top economist foresees ‘window of opportunity’ for social production force to leap forward

China News Service (CNS) co-hosted a high-level seminar from June 17-27 in Beijing to explains top Chinese buzzword New Quality Productive Forces.

Wang Yun, deputy director of the Research Center of Xi Jinping’s Economic Thought  addressed the seminar that global technological innovation is experiencing unprecedented intensity, with multiple technology breakthroughs in new-generation information, advanced manufacturing, new energy, new materials and so on. 

“Key technologies, collective advancements, and the emergence of disruptive technologies have provided necessary conditions for the cultivation and development of new quality productive forces”, Wang said.

“New quality productive forces”is a major concept put forward by Chinese President Xi Jinping. Marked by innovation, new quality productive forces are advanced productivity in essence, with high quality as the key and substantial increase in total factor productivity as its core hallmark.

Wang pointed out that technological innovation profoundly reshapes the basic elements of productivity, such as labor, means of labor, and objects of labor, driving an upgrade towards intellectual laborers, higher-tech means of labor, and a broader range of objects of labor, achieving optimal combinations, and giving rise to new industries, new models, and new drivers of growth.

“For example, the widespread application of new-generation information technology has led to the new form of digital economy, ushering us into the digital age,” Wang added.

According to the Global Innovation Index released by the World Intellectual Property Organization, China ranked 12th globally in 2023, up 22 places from 2012, with the number of top 100 global technological innovation clusters ranking first in the world for the first time. In 2023, China's R&D expenditure exceeded 3.3 trillion yuan (about $477.1 billion), with an R&D intensity of 2.64 percent, surpassing the average level of EU countries.