Li: China to meet growth goals

Premier Li Keqiang said China remains on track to meet its main economic goals for this year while warning of rising geopolitical risk and threats to the global upswing.

Anti-globalisation voices are emerging and world geopolitical risks are increasing, Li told officials and business leaders yesterday at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting of the New Champions gathering in China’s northeastern port city Dalian.

Li’s speech was a robust defence of globalisation and a thinly veiled rebuttal of the narrative adopted by US President Donald Trump, who has accused trading partners, including China, of unfair trading practices. It also had echoes of President Xi Jinping who also used the WEF’s Davos event in January to champion globalisation. China also used a Group of 20 meeting in Germany in March to push back, unsuccessfully, against US efforts to water down language of resisting protectionism

China opening up

Without the current rules-based world trading system, China’s economic opening up to the world would have been “unimaginable,” Li said. “Economic globalisation has greatly facilitated the flow of goods, capital and personnel.”

Li also said the government will relax market access to the services and manufacturing sectors — addressing a key complaint of foreign businesses operating in China - and pledged to do more to entice investment and cut red tape for foreign companies. The country will treat domestic and foreign businesses in an equal way, he said.

With executives of foreign companies such as International Business Machines Corp. and McKinsey & Co. in the audience, Li addressed the concern that stricter capital controls the nation implemented to keep its currency steady will restrict companies to move their profits out of the border. Foreign direct investment declined in both May and April from a year earlier.