Employees work at a wheel company in Qinhuangdao, Hebei province, Feb 2, 2023. (Photo by Xinhua)

New blueprint charts clearer path for more competitive industries, clusters

Accelerated efforts will be made to improve the overall quality of Chinese products and services, as well as the influence of Chinese brands, by 2025, so as to boost the country's industrial competitiveness for more economic growth, government officials said on Thursday.

They made the remarks as the State Council, China's Cabinet, recently launched a plan that said, by 2035, a solid foundation should be built to this end, with the comprehensive competitiveness of Chinese products and brands at a higher level.

"Enhancing quality is important to driving Chinese-style modernization, promoting a large economy to be stronger and boosting high-quality development of the economy and society," said Tian Shihong, deputy head of the State Administration for Market Regulation, China's top market regulator.

"Compared with previous plans, the new plan puts more focus on indicators like the expansion of quality-competitive industries and the establishment of a number of quality-excellent industrial clusters," Tian said.

The plan, which put out eight key tasks, vowed remarkable improvement in the quality of industrial development, including enterprise management, upgrading the value chain of traditional competitive industries and advancing the services industry.

More efforts will also be made to improve the upgrading quality of daily life services and guide the standardized development of emerging personalized services, such as online ride-hailing, online shopping and mobile payments, it added.

The plan is also in line with the goals proposed at the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, focusing on developing the real economy and promoting new industrialization, including building China into a bigger economy in quality product manufacturing and provider of services.

Over the past years, China has seen the quality of major technical equipment, projects, important consumer goods and high-tech products in emerging fields reaching higher levels, and the qualified product rating of the country's manufacturing industry hit more than 93 percent for several years consecutively, according to the SAMR.

"However, it should be noted that the quality of some Chinese products and services still lags behind that of those in some other nations, especially in advanced industrial components and technologies. Thus, the plan comes in a timely manner to solve these problems," said Zhang Junwei, a researcher of macroeconomic research at the Development Research Center of the State Council.

Editor: Li Wenpei