Understanding Realities
Africa needs to follow its own path of reform to realize its potential
It has been 40 years since China embarked on “crossing the river by feeling the stones,” navigating through the untrodden path and uncharted waters to drive its iconic modernization effort through reform and opening up.
In the keynote speech to the first China International Import Expo (CIIE) held in Shanghai in early November, Chinese President Xi Jinping described the last four decades of reform and opening up in China as an “epic journey for the Chinese people,” and added that “China has pursued development with its door open and succeeded in transforming a closed and semi-closed economy into a fully open economy.”
China’s epic revolutionary struggle leading to national liberation and socialist construction is momentous in the annals of human history, and nothing prepared the world for the historic Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in December 1978, where the decision to take economic modernization as the core of its work was made, heralding reform and opening up as the major trajectory for its future governance of China.
Keep moving forward
Even though reform and opening up, according to Xi, “is a strategic decision made by