The following is a summary of Huang Hanquan's keynote address to attendees at the Seventh Annual Conference of Government and Economics held at Tsinghua University, Beijing, on June 7, 2025. Dr. Huang is Director General and Senior Fellow of the Chinese Academy of Macroeconomic Research (CAMR).
On June 10, 2025, the Seventh Annual Conference of Government and Economics, co-hosted by the Society for the Analysis of Government and Economics (SAGE) along with Tsinghua University's School of Social Sciences and the Academic Center for Chinese Economic Practice and Thinking (ACCEPT), was broadcasted online. Huang Hanquan, Director General and Senior Fellow of the Chinese Academy of Macroeconomic Research (CAMR), delivered a keynote address to attendees at the conference.
Huang conveyed that the current imbalance in the world economic structure has made it especially imperative for China, as the world's largest manufacturing and trade surplus country, to rebalance its international trade with major consumer countries such as the United States. Since Trump took office, American trade policy has further upset the existing balance, forcing China's economy to undergo a transformation from its export-oriented model to one that is driven by domestic demand. Huang meanwhile suggested that structural reform on both the supply and demand sides has become a vitally important means to resolve this ongoing dilemma. On the supply side, it is necessary to accelerate the development of "new quality productive forces," including promoting advancements in artificial intelligence and big data, as well as other technologies capable of empowering traditional industries, while at the same time transforming and upgrading the manufacturing sector. Furthermore, it is also vital to curb the "involution" characterized by irrational competition while working towards strengthening the overall resilience of industrial value chains. When it comes to demand-side reforms, the imperative to undertake restructuring is even more urgent. Given that relying merely on traditional fiscal and monetary policy readjustments is unlikely to generate the desired results, it is now crucial to undertake more extensive reforms to the country's income distribution, social security and taxation systems, in this way fundamentally enhancing residents' capacity and willingness to consume. Especially in the context of insufficient consumption demand and industrial overcapacity, consumption has become the underlying "weak point" restricting the economy's growth potential.
He stressed that boosting consumption requires both systematic policy supports, such as improving China's income distribution system, strengthening social security, promoting the development of green consumption and high-end consumption, etc., as well as removing certain institutional barriers, such as restrictions on the purchase of automobiles and residential properties, in addition to overly cumbersome approval processes. Only when the government is able to better play its proper role, including by guiding the allocation of economic resources and stimulating the intrinsic dynamism of the market economy, will the country be in a position to fully realize a higher-quality form of development and the stable functioning of the domestic-international "dual circulation" model.