Grasping the Basic Principles in Developing New Institutions for a Higher-Standard Open Economy

The overall objective of developing new institutions for a higher-standard open economy is to establish a modern institutional framework that enables comprehensive, effective, and fair competition between enterprises under various forms of ownership; facilitates freer and more orderly flow of goods, services, and production factors; significantly optimizes the market-oriented, law-based, and internationalized business environment; ensures a high level of alignment with international rules in investment, trade, finance, and innovation; improves the system of safeguards for opening up; markedly enhances risk prevention and control capabilities and regulatory oversight with regard to opening up; and promotes more efficient and smoother interplay between domestic and international economic flow. 

In carrying out this systematic project, we must adhere to the basic principles that ensure opening up is well-coordinated with the following areas. 

Development

The purpose of opening up is to promote development, and the level of development determines the degree of opening up. We must plan and advance opening up based on the objective of high-quality development, ensuring stronger coordination between efforts to attract foreign investment and promote outbound investment, and between trade in goods and trade in services. We also need to promote greater integration between goods, capital, technology, talent, and data with regard to opening up. 

Based on the development levels of various Chinese industries and sectors, we must soundly manage the pace, steps, and intensity of opening up to continue raising our level of openness to the outside world.

Reform

Reform and opening up are mutually reinforcing and complementary processes. Deepening reform provides the institutional foundation for opening up, while opening up, in turn, sets a higher bar for further reform. 

Neither reform nor opening up should come to a halt. To see that in-depth reform and high-standard opening up advance in tandem, we need to ensure systematic integration and efficient coordination between these two endeavors. 

We should promote connectivity between domestic and international markets and the sharing of production factors and resources by continuously improving the socialist market economy system. We need to drive new breakthroughs in the reform of systems and mechanisms by means of higher-standard opening up. 

Innovation

Innovation is a key objective of opening up, while opening up is an important driver of innovation. With a focus on national strategic needs and the frontiers of international competition, we need to develop a more integrated design for pursuing original, integrated, and open innovation, so as to give full rein to innovation as the primary development driver. 

Through opening up, China should strive to integrate itself into global innovation networks, accelerate the development of a globally competitive open innovation ecosystem, deepen international cooperation on innovation, enhance our capacity to drive the global allocation of advanced production factors, and foster new quality productive forces.

Security

Security is an essential prerequisite for opening up, while opening up is an important guarantee for security. We must remain firmly committed to a holistic national security approach and fully take account of the increasingly complex and severe international environment. 

Regarding economic security as the foundation, we should develop regulatory and risk prevention and control capabilities that are well-adapted to high-standard opening up and boost our ability to dynamically protect national security in an open environment. 

This means fostering positive interactions between high-standard opening up and greater security by promoting faster development through opening up, which in turn, will help to better guarantee national security.

Editor: Zhang Xian