Better Leveraging the Guiding Role of Economic System Reform: Pathways, Mechanisms, and Priorities

Throughout China's reform process, economic system reform has consistently served as a pioneer, trailblazer, catalyst, and guide. The new factors, forces, and spaces it has generated, together with the new problems and opportunities it has created, have guided and advanced reforms in other fields while continuously providing new impetus for economic development. Fundamentally, the guiding role of economic system reform is determined by the foundational position of the economy. By liberating and developing the productive forces, economic system reform lays the material and intellectual foundations for comprehensive reform, elevates people's needs, and fosters the growth of the middle-income group, thereby generating endogenous impetus for reform in non-economic fields. Changes in the economic system inevitably drive significant changes in the operational logic of such key fields as politics, culture, society, ecology, innovation, security, and people's well-being; the new institutional demands created by economic system reform nurture forces that drive reform in other fields, prompting reform to permeate and diffuse across them. During the 15th Five-Year Plan period, efforts should focus on accelerating the establishment of a high-standard socialist market economy and better leveraging the guiding role of economic system reform. This entails achieving a higher-level dynamic balance between an efficient market and a well-functioning government, consolidating the micro-level foundations of the market economy, establishing institutions and mechanisms that support comprehensive innovation, and promoting complementary reforms in other fields and links with a focus on "investing in people," thereby laying a solid institutional and systemic foundation for high-quality development and Chinese modernization.