At the 17th Caixin Summit held in Beijing from November 11 to 13, Liu Shichun, former vice director of the Economic Committee of the 13th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and former vice president of the Development Research Center of the State Council, proposed that China should establish a consumer market with global influence and competitiveness.
Liu Shichun stressed that not only is manufacturing a competitive advantage, but the consumer market is also an important competitive advantage, and China has the potential and conditions to form a competitive advantage in the consumer market with global influence and competitiveness.
Liu Shichun first reiterated a common sense: the purpose of production is to satisfy the people's desire for a better life, which in practice means expanding consumption. Around building a globally competitive consumer market, he gave five reasons.
First, expanding consumption is not only a livelihood issue, but also an urgent issue of macroeconomic balance and growth. Second, expanding consumption will not compete for resources with the development of high-tech industries; on the contrary, it is the foundation and prerequisite for the development of high-tech industries. Liu Shichun pointed out that without a sufficiently large consumer market, it would be difficult for innovation results to complete the commercialization cycle. Third, the root cause of some prominent problems and difficulties in current economic operations lies in insufficient consumption, and only by expanding consumption can they be addressed at the source. Fourth, a strong domestic consumer market helps accelerate the process of RMB internationalization. The most important aspect of RMB internationalization is still the real economy, which must have scale and a market. Fifth, a competitive domestic consumer market is conducive to improving international trade conditions and enhancing geopolitical and major-power game capabilities.
On policy measures, Liu Shichun suggested "lowering the savings rate to below 40% within a not-too-long period and correspondingly raising the consumption rate to above 60%," improving the social security system, incorporating the growth rate of residents' disposable income, the residents' consumption rate, and the social insurance participation rate into local and departmental assessments, reducing government spending on economic construction, gradually raising the proportion used for livelihood from the current around 40% to around 60%, and promoting the transformation of government functions from an economic-construction type to one of coordinated economic, social, and ecological development.
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