Xi: Strengths should be put to good use

Meeting on reform stresses institutional advantages enabled victory in outbreak

Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, emphasized on Monday the importance of making good use of the country’s institutional strengths in responding to risks and challenges in an increasingly severe and complicated environment for development.

It is more necessary now to steadfastly deepen reforms, perfect systems of various kinds, improve governance and further transform institutional improvement into administrative efficiency, he said.

Xi, head of the Central Committee for Deepening Overall Reform, made the remarks when presiding over the committee’s 13th meeting.

Xi stressed that the fundamental reason that China could effectively advance COVID-19 pandemic prevention work and resume production was because the CPC leadership and China’s socialist system played an irreplaceably important role.

Meeting participants said the guarantee of medical supplies is an important basis for curbing the contagion’s spread and winning the people’s war against the virus, according to a statement released after the meeting.

In the battle against the outbreak, departments have coordinated with each other, adopted measures together, organized enterprises to quickly resume work and production and expanded their production capacity and output, it said. Medical supplies for priority areas have been guaranteed through the country’s unified deployment and transported through fast-track means.

The meeting urged greater efforts to strengthen top-level design, improve coordination among departments and build material supply systems for medical prevention and treatment, material reserves and mobilization of production capacity.

The variety, scale and structure of emergency material reserves should be improved, and innovation should ensure that crucial supplies can be deployed and used at critical moments, it said.

Meeting participants stressed the need for good management of the medical insurance fund, which enables people to see doctors and preserve their health.

During the country’s battle against COVID-19, ministries including the National Healthcare Security Administration and the Ministry of Finance introduced policies in a timely way to ensure that the treatment of novel coronavirus patients was not affected because of medical cost problems. This reflected the superiority of China’s socialist system, they said.

The meeting required consistent efforts to build a prevention and control mechanism for medical insurance fund safety, safeguard social equality and justice, and promote the sound and sustainable development of the medical insurance system.

While progress has been made in the country’s reform of scientific and technological systems, meeting participants said that the implementation of reform tasks in this field is still unbalanced and inappropriate.

They pointed out that some major reforms are not advancing fast enough, coordination is insufficient regarding reforms in related areas and some deep-rooted institutional barriers have not been removed fundamentally.

According to the meeting, institutional improvements are required in order to strengthen scientific and technological innovation as well as the capacity to respond to emergencies and changes.

Efforts should be beefed up to build a new type of all-of-government and all-of-society system for tackling difficulties in developing core and key technologies, it said.

While the country should be prepared for worst-case scenarios, the meeting also required concentrated efforts to advance reform measures that help to promote production resumption, employment, investment and consumption, the development of medium and small-sized enterprises, basic livelihood and poverty alleviation.

Several documents were reviewed and approved at the meeting, including a guideline on reforms of the Growth Enterprises Market board, an overall plan for ecological system conservation and a guideline on enhancing physical exercise for teenagers’ healthy development.