The Power of Reading – A Recommendation from Quan Heng: Into the Next Round of Chasing: From Quantity Expansion to Quality Upgrade
“The Power of Reading· Always Be Together” thematic activity, jointly organized by Shanghai Federation of Social Science Associations, Shanghai Century Publishing Group and Wenhui Newspaper, invited experts, scholars and readers to share their thoughts and understandings developed in their reading amidst fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, so as to practically inspire love for reading in all people, manifest the power of reading, and bring confidence and hope to the period overshadowed by the pandemic.
Quan Heng
Vice Chairman of Shanghai Federation of Social Science Associations, and Secretary of the CPC Party Committee of Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences
While occupied by pandemic prevention and control, I’ve been thinking over how to overcome the challenge from COVID-19 to economic development, how to coordinate anti-pandemic measures and economic development to achieve success in fields. These challenges indeed involve hard choices, each vitally important. Hence, this book: Into the Next Round of Chasing: From Quantity Expansion to Quality Upgrade is well worth recommendation, as it’s especially enlightening and thought-provoking in terms of properly balancing economic growth rates and development quality, fostering drivers for China’s economic development in the future, achieving high-quality development and so on.
Recent years have witnessed major transformation in economic and social development concepts to accelerate the shift from fast growth to quality growth. What’s more, the CPC Central Committee made it clear that we will align our efforts with the new development stage, follow the new development philosophy, foster a new development paradigm and strive to achieve high-quality development. As for the book, what has struck me as especially interesting is the classification of world economic growth into the innovation-led type, shared by technology advanced countries; and the chasing type, seen in latecomer countries. The author believes that China’s progress these years are mainly achieved through advantages of a latecomer. However, the problem is that the chasing type development is by nature periodic, which means, in certain phases of development, drivers and structures must be upgraded to continue the momentum. By that time, the relay should be fueled by the efficiency improvement of technological advancement, resources allocation and labor productivity out of future technological and institutional innovations. These statements surprisingly coincide with the connotation and requirement that China has put forward for high-quality development. According to the concept that we will ground our efforts in the new development stage, follow the new development philosophy, foster a new development paradigm and strive to achieve high-quality development, more growth dynamism and growth effects should be created through technological advance, institutional reform, and structural upgrade. Should such a path be followed, the vision and direction for China’s economy to achieve high-quality development under pandemic strikes can be mapped out, which is a strong boost to people’s belief in achieving dual success both in pandemic control and economic development.
In this book, the author starts from the theoretical analysis of latecomer countries’ chasing cycles, studies the causes, challenges and countermeasures for China’s transformation during its development in combination with variables in current supplies, demands and global economic environment.
