As it acts upon the 13th Five Year Plan, Beijing must combine government fiscal investment, corporate R&D, industrial investment, venture capital, bank credit investment, capital market financing, science funding and more, to make a financial system with a full range of support to update China’s economy. An efficiently operating system will be key to the nation’s future competitiveness.

Last month, China’s leaders revealed details of the 13th Five-Year Plan, which will guide the economy’s trajectory until 2020. Gone are the directives to expand industrial production at a breakneck pace that characterized previous five-year plans. Now, the focus is on achieving sustainable long-term growth, underpinned by domestic consumption, a stronger services sector, entrepreneurship, and innovation.

Except for the disruptive years of the “cultural revolution”, the five-year planning system has given the country a unified strategic outlook, especially in the recent years of opening up and development. The current CPC Central Committee is steering the Chinese government, in the coming five years, to emphasize people’s livelihood and well-being, and to effectively promote economic transformation and consolidation.

In the past, people measured China’s contribution to global economic growth through China’s GDP growth. But many factors in the GDP are the profits created by the foreign companies’ investments in China, so new ways of looking at the impact of China’s economy are in order.

The expansion of the Chinese economy and the resulting improvements in the lives of Chinese people have been impressive outcomes of the just-ending Five-Year Plan, despite the recent slowdown in the economy. The blueprint for (2016-2020) is taking shape to build on that progress.

Beginning this week, the Party must agree on the direction of China’s 13th Five-Year Plan, which is to be launched in 2016 and is supposed to enable the country to graduate from middle-income status by 2020 by reforming the quality of market competition, government accountability, and the provision of public goods and services

China’s recently announced cap-and-trade system to limit emissions is a positive development, but not new. China’s emissions trading system (ETS) has seen some capping, and very little trading. Additional challenges lie ahead in the pricing of carbon and introduction of unified measurement, reporting, and verification systems.

Top leaders in China's ruling Communist Party will hold a key meeting from Oct. 26 to 29 to discuss the next five-year plan.

 At 7.7%, China’s annual GDP growth in the first quarter of this year was slower than many expected. While the data were hardly devastating relative to a cons