Former Chilean envoy praises China's reforms

SANTIAGO - Reforms to be discussed in the upcoming Third Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee of China's Communist Party (CPC) is comparable to the one in 1978 and will have a significant impact on China for a long term, a former Chilean ambassador said Friday.

Fernando Reyes Matta, former ambassador to China made the applause in an article published on local daily La Tercera, titled "China and its challenges".

He said this session, scheduled on November 9-12 in Beijing, "will be as important as the one in 1978, when Deng Xiaoping initiated great economic reforms, which gave rise to today's China."

CPC Third Plenary Session

Reyes Matta, serving now as director of the Center of Latin American Studies on China, said Chinese Premier Li Keqiang announced upon taking office that he would promote sustainable development accompanied by increasing urbanization and growing domestic consumption.

Efforts should be made to overcome deep-rooted obstacles and push forward structural reforms and reforms concerning finance, price and enterprises, Li has said.

"The reforms will not just be for the next few years of this government, but for the coming decades," Reyes Matta said.

"The model of growth must change, lower but continual and of greater quality and creativity. To go from 'Made in China' to 'Designed in China'," he added.

Noting that the CPC's national congress in 2012 expanded China's historic goals for political, economic, social and cultural progress by adding "the creation of an ecological civilization," Reyes Matta said, "that has turned into a main undertaking against the backdrop of the country's high levels of pollution."

"It was the price of growth over the past three decades, which can't go on any longer," he said.

Reyes Matta also underscored the recent launching of a free trade zone in Shanghai, which will attract foreign capital that is interested in import and export in South East Asia.

"It presents the idea of establishing an experimental zone, outside of China's formal borders, where the yuan can be freely exchanged and banking rates would be set by market forces," he added.

He believed "the reforms they announced should lead to development based on manufacturing, services and high technology."