2nd Ld: CPC convenes key meeting on nation’s next five-year plan

The fifth plenary session of the 18th CPC Central Committee will discuss proposals for making the five-year plan for the country’s national economic and social development from 2016 to 2020, Xinhua reported. Monetary policy easing in the world’s second-largest economy is at its most aggressive since the 2008/09 financial crisis, as growth looks set to slip to a 25-year-low this year of under 7 percent. “From the conversation with officials, it is understandable that these targets remain binding despite the marked slowdown in the economy since then”, says Barclays. The EconoTimes content received through this service is the intellectual property of EconoTimes or its third party suppliers.

China is facing slower growth and senior leaders have previously said the country will work to shift the fundamentals of the economy away from a focus on high growth and towards a more sustainable framework.

In particular, markets were focused on the target for gross domestic product growth which would come out of the meeting, with a few bandying about the possibility a rate of expansion of 6.5% being set as the objective for the coming five-year plan.

The plan is to be implemented next year after it is formally approved by the rubber stamp legislature.

Economic malaise and the specter of intractable pollution confronted China’s communist leaders as official media reported they gathered to plan the nation’s course for the next five years, following a surprise interest rate cut. Others are cheering what they called the party’s ” extraordinary achievements” over the course of the previous five-year plan.

The Chinese communist party is holding a key meeting to figure out a development blueprint for the next 5 years.

Hu Angang, an economics professor at Tsinghua University, said bold environmental reforms can not continue to have a lower priority than growth.

And the official Global Times newspaper said in a commentary Monday that “medium- to high-speed economic growth” was “anticipated”, and was “the basis for public confidence”. The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) also said it was freeing the interest rate market by scrapping a ceiling on deposit rates.

However, Liu said that to do so would “take political will. The vested interest groups, those SOEs, obviously don’t want to see their territory breached by the private sector”.

The new five-year plan, China’s 13th, has henceforth garnered increasing attention from observers both home and overseas.

China’s current public-holiday system features long stretches of vacation – the National Day “Golden Week” in October and Chinese New Year in late winter – that were created in a bid to spur consumer spending. And it said citizens expected “better and more affordable education and medical services, and accessible social security”.