Gao Fan：Responding to the “Questions of the Times” with Localized Institutional Innovation

  Against the backdrop of socialism with Chinese characteristics in a new era, China is facing the four questions of the times: How has the modernization of China developed since the founding of the People’s Republic? How should China respond to the changes in the internal and external economic and social patterns? How can China achieve higher strategic goals from a new starting point of development? What is the connotation of the system in the Chinese discourse of confidence in the system? At the Fourth Plenary Session of its 19th Central Committee, the CPC responded to these questions from the perspective of institution building and institutional guarantee. China’s institutional arrangements for responding to these questions have four distinct characteristics: local, systematic, operational and dynamic, and reflect the development process from institutional exploration to institutional finalization and maturity, and the cognitive process from practical exploration to empirical summarization and refinement. In view of the important role of the economic system in economic development and the importance of economic development for modernization, at the Fourth Plenary Session, the Party made four major innovations in the economic system: defining the basic economic system encompassing ownership, the distribution system and the economic operation mechanism; understanding the basic economic system in the overall framework of the fundamental system; coordinating the basic economic system with important institutional arrangements for the operational systems such as the scientific and technological innovation system and the new open economic system; and making new specific additions to the basic economic system and important economic system.