Understanding China's economy into 2025 - evolved development strategy, reform priorities and short-term macroeconomic management
January 2025 | CMG’s newest CMG Primer publication, titled “Understanding China’s economy into 2025 – evolved development strategy, reform priorities and short-term macroeconomic management”, wants to provide our clients, current and new readers with a holistic and coherent interpretation of what is going on strategically in China’s economy into 2025 from a foreign business perspective because of the crucial timing at the start of the year with a slow post-Covid economic recovery now coinciding with Donald Trump’s return to the White House for his second term as US President.
A core point that this new publication argues is that the CCP’s key reform meeting the “Third Plenum” held last year in July took its decisions for the scenario of Donald Trump being re-elected and focused on accelerating China’s reforms and opening-up to both the least developed economies and more broadly non-US nations, in fact doubling down on the “high-level opening up” policy direction based on the Dual Circulation formalized with the 14th Five-Year-Plan in March 2021 and enshrined into the CCP constitution at the 20th Party Congress in October 2022, while starting to actively seek opportunities in pluri- or multilateral formats.
Domestically, our publication highlights key reform priorities including China’s socialist market economy or the “New Quality Productive Forces” (NQPF). Thereby, NQPF needs to be seen as a new principle in China’s overarching economic policymaking that seeks to better link China’s S&T/innovation- (tech-focused) to its industrial policymaking (economic value creation-focused) through better integrating the “industry-academic-research” chain, stretching its ambition for future industries and providing a new lasting top-level rationale for China’s quest to increase the contribution of innovation (i.e. Total-Factor-Productivity, or TFP) to China’s future GDP growth.
In terms of China’s short-term macroeconomic management, we spotted a changed tone since July Politburo meeting shifting the focus more on reviving growth dynamism than structural reforms, with bolder counter-cyclical interventions introduced since September 2024 incl. the strongest monetary easing since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) to counter the economy’s heightened downward pressure. Consistent with policymakers focus on the “supply side” in the post-pandemic period – except for the CEWC 2022 –, the intervention is explicitly clarified to be merely a short-term “fix” (校正), while the long-term policy focus remains to be structural reforms for economic transition. First indicators of these interventions as per December 2024 show initial positive trends for both demand and supply side.
The publication ends on sharing CMG’s high-level view – based on its past and ongoing client cases – on the state of European business’ strategic decision-making related to the Chinese market, and also highlights how our value proposition is defined in a way to support European business precisely responding to the key challenges we perceive and describe.
Read-out webinar recording:
You can re-watch our Read-Out Webinar on this publication held on 28th January 2025 and presented by our CMG colleagues Alex Zheng Zhou, Senior Analyst, and Markus Herrmann, Co-Founder and Managing Director of CMG, on behalf of the CMG team.
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