BEIJING: China’s Communist Party kicked off a key meeting on Monday, known as the third plenum, led by President Xi Jinping and focused on the economy, state media reported.
“The 20th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) started its third plenary session in Beijing on Monday morning,” Xinhua news agency said.
Xi Jinping, general secretary of the CPC Central Committee, “delivered a work report on behalf of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and expounded on a draft decision of the CPC Central Committee on further comprehensively deepening reform and advancing Chinese modernization.”
The meeting begins as the country posted a 4.7 percent year-on-year growth rate for the second quarter.
“By quarter, the GDP for the first quarter increased by 5.3 percent year on year and for the second quarter 4.7 percent,” Beijing’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said in a statement.
The quarterly figure was lower than the 5.1 percent predicted by analysts polled by Bloomberg.
Ting Lu, chief China economist at Nomura, said the meeting was “intended to generate and discuss big, long-term ideas and structural reforms instead of making short-term policy adjustments.”
The Third Plenum has previously been an occasion for the party’s top leadership to unveil major economic policy shifts.
In 1978, then-leader Deng Xiaoping used the meeting to announce market reforms that would put China on the path to dazzling economic growth by opening it to the world.
More recently, following the closed-door meeting in 2013, the leadership pledged to give the free market a “decisive” role in resource allocation, as well as other sweeping changes to economic and social policy.
