Beijing. China will unswervingly march forward along the road of reform and opening-up, Chinese President Xi Jinping said on Wednesday, calling for building the pilot free trade zones (FTZs) toward new heights in the new era.

Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, made the remarks during a visit to South China’s Guangdong Province, the Xinhua News Agency reported on Wednesday.

Xi’s speech came as the country celebrates the 40th anniversary of its reform and opening-up. Experts said Xi’s speech clarified the direction of reform and opening-up, which requires the country to comprehensively deepen reform to better blend into the process of globalization and participate in developing a global role.

Xi urged greater efforts to advance the development of pilot FTZs to generate more replicable institutional innovation, to make greater contributions to achieving China’s two centenary goals and national rejuvenation.

Five years of enterprising and pioneering work in the country’s pilot FTZs has seen major progress and breakthroughs, offering the nation copious advances in institutional explorations, Xi said.

Maintaining an edge

The Guangdong FTZ was established in April 2014. Last year, the total value of imports and exports in FTZ surpassed 989.7 billion yuan ($142.4 billion), an increase of 4.81 percent year-on-year, Guangdong-based newspaper Information Times reported in May.

“Guangdong has always been a bellwether in the process of reform and opening-up,” Cong Yi, a professor of economics at the Tianjin University of Finance and Economics, told the Global Times on Thursday.

“It will maintain this advantage alongside the development of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao area,” Cong stressed.

“Establishing FTZs is a sign that China has built a complete socialist market economy system, as well as an expression of the country’s comprehensively deepened reform,” Su Wei, a professor at the Party School of the Communist Party of China Chongqing Municipal Committee, told the Global Times on Thursday.

Su said that the FTZs would become an effective approach for China to deal with trade protectionism and unilateralism.

The State Council, China’s cabinet, released a plan on October 16 to establish the country’s largest FTZ covering all of South China’s Hainan Province – 35,400 square kilometers – to build a high-level FTZ that offers a significantly improved business environment for foreign investment.

“At first, FTZs were a step for China to match global rules, but gradually it can act as a channel for the country to blend in the process, even in globalization management,” Cong said.

He noted that the Chinese government could learn through managing FTZs how to balance two different economic environments.

Deepening reform

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, who is also a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, stressed in an instruction that “it is necessary to focus on solving deep-rooted contradictions and structural problems, intensify overall reform planning and continue to highlight institutional innovation, so as to accelerate the formation of new development and competitive advantages,” Xinhua reported on Wednesday.

“Traditional socialist ideas and lagging behind in a legal sense still exist at the grass-roots level in China, which have caused hurdles in implementing some reform policies, and that is the problem we hope to solve in a comprehensively deepened reform,” Su noted.

“That is why we have been placing greater importance on a democratic legal system and inner-Party reform in recent years to catch up in these two aspects,” Su explained.

Cong said wider and deeper opening-up also requires China to build a better structure to fit globalization, especially with the development of the Belt and Road initiative, which China proposed in 2013.

(In association with Global Times)