A key financial meeting was held in Beijing on Monday and Tuesday to set the tone on China’s financial development.
The twice-a-decade central financial work conference is the highest profile financial meeting in China and charts the course for the country’s financial development and reform in the next stage.
A highlight of this year’s conference is the appearance of several new terms, including building a “leading financial nation” and exploring “the path of financial development with Chinese characteristics,” sending new signals for China’s future financial work, according to analysis.
Putting forward the notion of building “a leading financial nation” reveals that finance has played an increasingly important role and position in the whole national economy, said Liu Xiaochun, affiliated professor of Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
High-level financial opening-up
The conference emphasized efforts to promote high-level financial opening-up.
It is necessary to steadily expand institutional opening-up in the sector, improve cross-border investment and financing facilitation, aiming to attract more foreign financial institutions and long-term capital to develop businesses in China, said the conference.
In future, China will strive to make sure that its financial rules will be geared to international economic and trade rules and its current opening-up becomes more transparent and predictable, chief economist at Bank of China Securities Guan Tao told CMG.
Guan noted that China will further promote the marketization, rule of law and internationalization of its financial market by making good use of free trade zones, free trade ports and some financial centers.
The meeting urged to improve the competitiveness and influence of Shanghai as an international financial center and the status of Hong Kong as an international financial center.
Measures should also be taken to guard against foreign-related economic risks in the process of expanding opening-up, Guan added.
By the end of September, 202 banks from 52 countries and regions had set up institutions in China.
Data also shows that 1,110 overseas institutions had gained access to China’s bond market, with holdings topping 3.3 trillion yuan by the end of September.
Ensuring national financial security
Aligned with opening-up, financial security is also highlighted in the conference.
It stressed the necessity to ensure national financial and economic security, and that preventing financial risks must be the eternal theme of the financial sector.
From 2014 to September 2023, China saw its outstanding yuan-denominated loans issued to the real economy shoot up to over 230 trillion yuan (about $32.04 trillion) from 81.43 trillion yuan, with an average annual growth of 10 percent, generally in line with the nominal GDP growth, data from the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) reveals.
However, with the various problems intertwined in the financial sector, the meeting said that there are still hidden economic and financial risks, such as the occurrence of financial corruption, and low efficiency of the financial sector serving the real economy.
“The meeting put forward a series of requirements for the next step in financial regulation. It provides guidance and compliance for strengthening and improving financial supervision, filling regulatory gaps and improving the effectiveness of supervision in the future,” said Guan.
Noting the focus of the central financial work conference is advancing the building of a leading financial nation, Guan said that finance is the blood of the national economy and an important part of the country’s core competitiveness, “therefore, to build a leading financial nation is need for a leading economic nation.”
