Premier Li Qiang has urged officials to pull out all the stops in a race to achieve China’s major goals laid out during the past week’s “two sessions” meetings, such as maintaining an economic growth rate of around 5 per cent.
“We must refine measures and speed up their implementation, race against time amid various uncertainties, and work quickly and proactively,” Li said at a meeting of the State Council on Wednesday, a day after China’s top legislative and consultative bodies concluded their annual gathering.
All government agencies should “take the initiative to fulfil their responsibilities and take more positive actions to complete their tasks”, Li demanded, as Beijing outlined a series of policies to boost growth in the face of economic headwinds.
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Though they played up their confidence in the future of the world’s second-largest economy, Chinese leaders also emphasised during the two sessions that challenges remain, including weak domestic demand and intensifying trade frictions with the United States.
Li demanded that officials “closely monitor changes in the situation and make good policy preparations” to ensure that they can be launched in a timely manner and yield results as soon as possible, according to a readout of Wednesday’s meeting reported by Xinhua.
In his work report last week, Li emphasised that China’s growth target of around 5 per cent for 2025 underscores leadership’s resolve in meeting difficulties head-on and striving to deliver results.
But policymakers, while unveiling more fiscal stimulus measures at the two sessions, following a package in the last quarter of 2024, have also been stressing that China still has sufficient policy space to deal with internal and external uncertainties, especially as US President Donald Trump’s sweeping new policies reshape global trade.
Wednesday’s State Council meeting discussed and passed a work plan that clarifies the division of key tasks for the year among different departments, emphasising interdepartmental coordination, the official readout said.
Those include expanding the scale of 5G telecom tech applications and accelerating the development of 6G, according to a separate meeting of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology on the same day.
The ministry’s party secretary, Li Lecheng, pledged continued efforts to upgrade traditional industries, accelerate the digitalisation and green transformation of the manufacturing sector, and speed up the application of artificial intelligence, especially in areas such as electric vehicles, low-altitude economy and bio manufacturing.
According to data from the Ministry of Commerce, from January 1 to Tuesday, 1.664 million electric bicycles were sold and replaced nationwide, equivalent to 120.4 per cent of the total number in 2024.
Meanwhile, China’s leading state bank, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, vowed on Wednesday to provide financing of no less than 6 trillion yuan (US$829.2 billion) to private enterprises in the next three years, Xinhua reported.
This is aimed at “supporting enterprises to stick to their core businesses” and “help the economy continue to recover and improve”, the bank’s chairman, Liao Lin, was quoted as saying at an event in Beijing.
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