Asia-Pacific adapting to changes

China is joining the club of middle- and high-income economies and its middle-income group is expected to reach 600 million by 2020. As a result, not only domestic consumption and investment, but also exports and outward investment will create new opportunities of growth. Experts predict that China will offer business opportunities worth $17 trillion to the world, as well as 7 million jobs around the world from 2014 to 2020, and its contribution to global economic growth will reach 27 percent.

With economic development, China will further expand its opening-up policy. It is already welcoming waves of globalization in many sectors, and its talent recruitment, capital investment, manufacturing, market, even urbanization process will all be globalized. Some current initiatives, such as the Silk Road Economic Belt, are promoting China's economic integration with neighboring nations.

While manufacturing and low-cost labor used to be China's labels, innovation is playing an increasingly bigger role in its development. In 2013, R&D expenditure exceeded 1.19 trillion yuan ($309 billion) in China, or 2.09 percent of its GDP. With incomes being raised, Chinese consumers are now demanding higher quality products, thus encouraging enterprises to accelerate their R&D efforts; besides, China is strengthening cooperation with the rest of the world on intellectual property rights protection, which grants researchers more freedom.

Having learnt the lessons of the developed countries, which damaged the environment during their development and paid a heavy price in repairing the damage, China is determined to follow a new path of green growth. China promises to cut its carbon emissions per unit of GDP by 40 to 45 percent in 2020, while non-fossil energy should account for 15 percent of primary energy, and forest is expected to expand by 400,000 square kilometers.

All these development fruits will be shared by the whole society and ordinary people. Having invested enormously in improving domestic living conditions, China has vowed to lower the Gini coefficient, a measure of inequality of income or wealth, of its society to below 0.45. Internationally, the new leadership emphasizes more on international cooperation and will help more developing countries to get rich.

To that end, China will continue positively participating in global governance reform and the negotiations for free trade areas. It is striving for tighter economic ties with neighboring countries and regions, which will lay firm basis for Asia-Pacific economic integration.

While doing this, China hopes its goodwill will be echoed by other nations, and we expect the upcoming 2014 APEC Economic Leaders' Meeting this November can make more breakthroughs on economic integration.

The author is a senior researcher with the National Development and Reform Commission. This is an excerpt of his speech at the recent Pacific Economic Cooperation Council meeting.