Gaining a Sound Understanding of New Quality Productive Forces

Gaining a sound understanding of new quality productive forces and accel­erating their development holds important theoretical and practical significance for high-quality development.

In leading the Chinese people’s drive for development, the Communist Party of China (CPC) has placed paramount importance on releasing and developing productive forces. Through this process, it has steadily deepened its understand­ing of these forces and leveraged these insights to guide the practical endeavor of setting them free and nurturing their development.

On the new journey in the new era, high-quality development has emerged as the primary task in building a modern social­ist country. With an accurate grasp of both domestic and international dynamics as well as the imperatives for China’s high-quality development, President Xi Jinping has upheld and further developed Marxist theory on productive forces to put forward the idea of “new quality productive forces,” a concept that captures the very essence of our era. This concept serves as a powerful theoretical guide for promoting high-quality development.

The notion of new quality productive forces underscores the decisive role of historic leaps in productive forces. Follow­ing the Industrial Revolution, modern capitalist production based on mecha­nized industry supplanted traditional production reliant on manual labor, sparking a tremendous leap in produc­tive forces. Subsequently, further scientific and technological revolutions spurred two further industrial transformations, each giving rise to new productive forces. The first, commencing in the 1870s, centered on electricity and internal combustion engines. The second, which began in the 1970s, revolved around computers and communications technology.

At present, a new wave of scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation is surging forth. For China, this latest round of revolution and trans­formation is unfolding as it navigates the transformation of its growth model. This confluence presents China with unparal­leled opportunities while also posing formi­dable challenges in the form of widening disparities. It is within this historical context that the new quality productive forces have emerged and evolved. It is becoming increasingly clear that they are playing a decisive role in propelling another historic leap in the productive forces.

Editor: Jiang Wenyan