Countering concerns about China's economy

Premier Li Keqiang will attend and deliver a speech at the opening ceremony of the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting of the New Champions 2013, also known as the Summer Davos Forum, on Sept 11 in Dalian in Northeast China. His speech will elaborate on China's development trends and ever-deepening reform and help boost the world's confidence in the Chinese economy. It will also show that China is taking a leading and responsible role in contributing to the healthy development of the global economy, which is facing new challenges.

The timing of this forum is of special significance, as emerging economies are mostly battling their own difficulties instead of powering the global economy, as the decline of developed countries has to some extent been curbed by their quantitative easing monetary policies, their seizing of the commanding heights of the new technological revolution and accelerated reform of their industrial structures, and strengthened multilateral cooperation, particularly the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.

Due to the adverse effects caused by US Federal Reserve tapering off its quantitative easing, their hysteretic domestic economic reforms and single economic structures, emerging economies are facing challenges ranging from capital outflows, currency depreciation and financial market fluctuations to a significant slowdown in growth and looming inflation.

However, Premier Li will take the forum as an opportunity to show that despite the gloom-mongering of Western media about the prospects of emerging markets, especially China, and predictions of a shift in the global growth engines from emerging economies to developed economies, the outlook for China and other emerging economies is bright and they will resume their role as the drivers of global growth.

On the eve of the Summer Davos Forum, Li published an article entitled "China will stay the course on sustainable growth" in The Financial Times that roughly sketched out China's current economic situation in the course of its steady transformation and outlined the actions the government is taking to facilitate this transformation. Li made it clear that China can no longer afford to continue with its old economic model that relied on the high consumption of resources and high investment, and he emphasized that the government is taking a holistic approach to structural readjustment and further reform, while maintaining sustained and healthy growth.