Last week, the Chinese Communist Party held its third plenum, a closed door meeting of high-level party officials that has historically indicated the country’s policy direction on major issues, such as the economy. This was the first third plenum held since 2018 and was hotly anticipated, especially considering China’s faltering economic growth. We asked four experts to tell us more about the outcomes of the meeting and what this might indicate about China’s strategy in the coming months and years.Read more below.Collin Meisel Associate Director of Geopolitical Analysis Pardee Institute at the University of DenverAhead of last week’s Third Plenary Session of the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, party leaders telegraphed economic reforms that will seek to boost domestic consumption. Despite the extra attention that this and past third plenums have received given Deng Xiaoping’s historic announcement of his “reform and opening” policies during the third plenum of the 11th Party Congress in 1978, the reforms coming out of this year’s plenum appear to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary.While the Chinese Communist Party’s communique following last week’s meetings asserted that the party will “strive to expand domestic demand” – a goal which includes bolstering pensions, childbirth and childcare subsidies, and other “public spending as necessary,” according to the full post-plenum resolution – it stated in the same breath that it would “move faster to foster new drivers of foreign trade.” In other words, while the party appears to recognize that China’s stagnating economic growth is at least partly a product of weak household consumption, it does not yet appear ready to abandon the export-led growth model that has, until recently, served China’s economy so well since reform and opening.Meanwhile, Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping seems poised to continue to prioritize national security over economic growth, where “national security provides a pivotal foundation for ensuring steady
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Last week, the Chinese Communist Party held its third plenum, a closed door meeting of high-level party officials that has historically indicated the country’s policy direction on major issues, such as the economy. This was the first third plenum held since 2018 and was hotly anticipated, especially considering China’s faltering economic growth. We asked four experts to tell us more about the outcomes of the meeting and what this might indicate about China’s strategy in the coming months and years.Read more below.Collin Meisel Associate Director of Geopolitical Analysis Pardee Institute at the University of DenverAhead of last week’s Third Plenary Session of
