Quality more prominent to drive development

After a long period of rapid development, the country's advantages of labor and land are gradually weakening, the constraints of resources and environment are tightening, the pressure of aging is increasing, and the ability of scientific and technological innovation still needs to be strengthened.

To promote the momentum of sustainable development and secure the transition from a middle-income country to a developed modern country, China must make high-quality development a new driving force.

The central authorities recently released guidelines aimed at fostering new strengths in economic development, with a focus on technology, standards, brands, quality and services.

Currently, Southeast Asia, South Asia, Latin America, Middle East and Africa are all actively attracting manufacturing resources with their low labor costs. And a new round of scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation is underway. Technology and quality are becoming the key elements in foreign trade and the competition in the world market.

Given this, China must continuously raise the competitiveness of its products and services in the global market by improving their quality through innovation and effective management.

Chinese products and services mainly rely on the advantage of cost performance to win orders. The value added of its processing trade exports is slim, which to a certain extent necessarily limits the improvement of corporate profits, and thus suppresses the rise of wage levels. China's per capita income level remains low.

That means if the manufacturing industry in other developing countries continues to improve its competitiveness and the United States continues to press ahead with its decoupling attempts targeting China, the cost performance of Chinese products and services will be further weakened.

Also, the low income of laborers directly dampens the growth of the overall consumption in the country. The improvement of quality of products and services is thus not only conducive to boosting consumption, but also related to almost every aspect of the socioeconomic life of the country.

The guidelines include specific requirements and deployment on work related to industrial quality, products, engineering, service quality, infrastructure quality and brand construction, as well as the quality management system.

To implement it, the country should also strive to raise the nation's awareness of product quality, align itself with advanced technology, rules and standards, and raise the standards of quality supervision and rules so as to transfer the pressure of quality improvement to the overall market system.