The Connotations and Trends of China's Open Economy Moving toward a Higher Level

The "open economy" is a distinctively Chinese concept that encapsulates the profound implications of the development of China's foreign economic and trade cooperation since the launch of reform and opening up—that is, the integration of China's productive forces into the world economy. Since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, China's opening up has entered a new stage, marked chiefly by the fact that its open economy has not only continued to expand in quantity and scale but has also undergone a major stage-specific qualitative transformation. The central connotation of this transformation lies in General Secretary Xi Jinping's call to "jointly build an open world economy that is innovative and inclusive," which has endowed the development and upgrading of China's open economy with new concepts, requirements, and tasks. This paper summarizes three major trends in this transformation, explains its internal causes, external conditions, development potential, and value orientation, and reveals the underlying patterns governing the development and upgrading of China's open economy. The 15th Five-Year Plan period will provide broad scope for raising the level of China's open economy. It is necessary to follow objective laws and make concerted efforts to expand its quantity and scale, promote two-way interaction through institutional opening up, enhance the capacity of opening-up platforms, advance modernization in the Global South, and reform the global governance system where it is incompatible with an open world economy, thereby offering Chinese wisdom and contributing China's strength.