China’s third plenum needs to provide ‘clear direction, anchor’, reforms: scholar

Alfred Schipke says the upcoming third plenum needs to show China is open for business despite its challenges

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Published: 8:00am, 5 Jul 2024Updated: 1:47pm, 5 Jul 2024

China needs to provide “clear direction and an anchor” during the upcoming third plenum to revive market confidence, while a market mechanism and structural reforms are also required, a senior economics professor said ahead of this month’s key conclave.

“We’re hopeful that the [upcoming third plenum] document will speak to some of the issues … maybe strengthening property rights surrounding entrepreneurship and putting local government finances on sounder footing,” Alfred Schipke, director of the National University of Singapore’s East Asian Institute, told the Post in Beijing last week.

“Maybe some related to governance and giving a message to the global community that China, despite all the challenges that it faces, is open for business.”

Beijing confirmed last week that the third plenum of the new Central Committee would convene for four days from July 15 to chart China’s long-term growth path, which would include economic and tech development goals for the next decade, as well as a series of interim goals to be reached by 2035.

Schipke spent more than seven years as the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) senior resident representative for China from 2013 – the year Beijing vowed to let the market play a decisive role in resource allocation in its milestone reform document.

Before his relocation to India and then Singapore, Schipke had pushed the IMF advice of promoting structural reform in China, rather than debt accumulation.