BEIJING, Nov. 15 (Xinhua) -- The current transformation of the economic structure, as a boost of China's drive of reform and opening up launched in 1978, is in favorable mutual promotion with the improvement of the Chinese people's livelihood.
The essential target of China's reform, as Chinese President Xi Jinping said at Sunday's Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) CEO Summit, is to improve the people's well-being amid development of a more fair and sustainable social security system, improvement of the public service system and innovation of the social governance system.
Though a "new normal" of China's economy has emerged, indicators relating to the people's basic livelihood have not been negatively impacted by transformation of the economic structure and a slowdown in economic development, as residents' income continues to grow rapidly and the employment rate remains stable.
In the first three quarters of 2014, 10.82 million new jobs were created, and urban and rural residents' income rose respectively by 6.9 percent and 9.7 percent.
Ryan Rutkowski, an analyst with Washington's Peterson Institute, said the "new normal" of China's economy is employment rather than output. In his opinion, the new leadership has adopted a tolerant attitude toward an economic slowdown, but the labor market does not show unfavorable performance because of the downtrend of growth.
This results from the government's adoption of approaches for optimizing the economic structure and improving both quality and efficiency of the economy.
Since the general target of full-scale deepening of reform was unveiled at the 3rd Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China a year ago, the Chinese government has pushed forward reform in such fields concerning the people's livelihood as education, medical care, the ecological environment, social security and housing.
Ranging from the accelerated transformation of shanty towns to the adoption of new policies on the household registration system and from the launch of a harsh campaign against corruption to the reform of the salary system for the state-owned enterprises, all these measures are designed to enable the people to share the fruit of reform and development in a better and fairer way.
Earlier this year, the State Council approved the Opinions on Priority Tasks for Deepening Reform of the Economic System in 2014 formulated by the National Development and Reform Commission, which pointed out that efforts should be closely focused on solving difficulties in promoting development and improvement of the people's livelihood, and on giving priority to adopting reform approaches capable of generating direct results to stabilizing growth, restructuring and enabling the people to live a better life.
As improvement of the people's livelihood is a most fundamental orientation of values in the deepening of reform, it will inevitably be in a relationship of mutual promotion with economic development.
At present, residents' consumption patterns in China are undergoing upgrading while new points of consumption keep emerging, which will inject new vigor and vitality into industrial upgrading and transformation of the economic structure.
The economic structure in China is undergoing profound changes, with emergence of a better quality and a more rational structure. Meanwhile, there have emerged multiple driving forces for growth.
From January to September, consumption contributed to 48.5 percent of China's economic growth, outdoing investment, which accounted for only 41.5 percent. The service industry accounted for 46.7 percent of the GDP, 1.2 percentage points higher than the same period of last year.
The German newspaper Die Welt commented that preliminary successes in China's economic transformation have turned increasingly obvious: Growth of the service industry and domestic demand are playing an increasingly important role in the general economic development.
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