A look from the inside: Chinese political and economic system

After spending 12 amazing, incredible but exhausting days in China I figure it out how complex is this country. You can find an amazing country with drastically contrast: you are in a small street with small buildings mainly with local shops and not precisely a wealthy neighborhood and you turn around the corner and you can find an impressive street that can make you thing that you are in New York with that spectacular buildings and luxury shops.

China is a country of contrasts or at least that´s the feeling that a Spanish girl like me have.

But carry on with the theme that bring me here today, the Chinese political and economical system cannot be explain without mentioned the well-known for Chinese citizens: the FIVE-YEAR PLAN

The five-year plan is the plan that the government brings every five years to planned the main objectives that they are going to follow in that period of time.

Nowadays China is in the 13th five year plan (2016-2020) and they are focus in five main themes:

–Innovation: focus on scientific research and achievements, invention patents, and important foundation technologies.

–Greening: make development more sustainable, clean up, environmental problems, build a national competitive advantage in CleanTech.

-Coordination: streaming administration and cooperation across the government, delegating power to lower levels.

-Opening: opening up to the outside, encouraging more investment abroad, retaining incoming investment.

-Sharing: to make society more equitable, healthier and happier.

As a student of sustainable development I am particularly happy that they include in their five-year plan a greening part where they are trying to be more sustainable and fix environmental problems, taking in consideration that they have big problems with the pollution. This is not a myth I can prove myself the effects of the pollution in your health and daily life.

Some important targets inside the Chinese political and economical system included in the 13th five year plan are the objective of double the GDP and per-capita income for urban and rural residents, more infrastructure and more modernization of manufacturing and communications.

In this last target the internet + have an important role: Chinese government is really interested in internet of things, big data, AI, etc. but they have a tough task I can personally confirm that the speed of the internet in China is a disaster. Besides the censorship made by the government is not exactly making things easier.

This theme about the censorship is a big surprise at least for me, what is really unexpected is how Chinese people “love” their government or at least they do not say nothing bad about it. I will let you decide if this is truth or just fear, we cannot know the answer.

Continuing with the theme the Chinese government is really involved in creating new jobs for their citizens, they are strongly trying to fight against unemployment this is so strong that even create new projects just to create more jobs. For example they are developing what we can call the new cities tiers. They create cities before there are people to live there, but surprisingly these cities are not ghost cities for a long time. Government use this cities too to fix the urbanization process that is taking place in the country.

We cannot forget the impressive project that Xi Jinping, China´s actual president, have created: One Belt-One Road or the Silk road initiative, this means that China aims to build a global infrastructure network. Some people say that is wonderful other are afraid of the consequences, I am not going to involved myself in the discussion we will se what happens in the future.

Another of the many things that surprise me during my trip was the total control that the government have over everything, definitely if you want to create your own business in China you have to consider this.

According to policies on foreign investments you have some restrictions, logistics is something trendy nowadays in China but we can summarize in you are free to operate in whatever you want but if the government say something you have to “obey” them.

So In conclusion we can see how it is really important to understand China through its different politics and how China strongly trying to be achieve the idea of the Chinese dream where they want all the people to have access to the basic things, at the same time that they fight agains corruption but eve with that they are aim to achieve a monopoly. This that not have any sense to me, if you want to fight against corruption stimulate the creation of a monopoly is not the best way, but we will leave this conversation for another moment.

You cannot understand their politics, economics and foreign investment system without understand or at least their five year plan. That´s why I briefly try to explain it here.

It has been a wonderful trip that gave me the opportunity to discover a new whole country and culture, and even if I am not a big fan of chopsticks I for sure want to come back not only as a tourist but also in a future as a posible helper to develop sustainability and CSR there, we can not forget that China is known as one of the most powerful countries in manufacture what gives them a huge power in our actual world.

Lara Sastre-Estevez de la Torre.

No hay comentarios / 17 Mar 2017 por lsastreestevez
IMSD /

Comentarios cerrados.