Xi's Guangdong trip clarion call for reforms: China Daily editorial

President Xi Jinping's inspection trip to South China's Guangdong province, which was the trailblazer for China's economic reform and opening-up 40 years ago, sends a strong message that the leadership has both the resolve and courage to continue on this path.

However, the international situation is different from what it was four decades ago, and so are the global obstacles and domestic difficulties China faces in deepening its economic reform and further opening itself up to the outside world.

That explains why President Xi stressed the importance of China achieving its own innovations while visiting the headquarters of Gree Electric Appliances in Zhuhai on Monday, saying that manufacturing is the core of the real economy and calling on Chinese enterprises to obtain core technologies through innovations of their own.

While it is true that China welcomes core technologies introduced from foreign countries, and cooperation is always necessary for innovations in this globalized world. The trade frictions with China unilaterally triggered by the United States, and the Donald Trump administration's increasingly hostile policies aimed at curbing the development of this country, have shown how important and urgent it is for China to make independent innovations.

The country's development over the past four decades has laid a solid foundation for the further progress of the country's industries, which have already made a lot of breakthroughs in science and technology in recent years.

However, there still remains much to be desired when it comes to the country's endogenous innovation capacity, and there are still many stumbling blocks that need to be removed so enterprises and research labs are able to effectively concentrate their resources on developing core technologies.

That explains why reforms can never cease, and why they must be furthered as extensively as possible so that all the barriers in the way of technological innovations can be swept away.

In the new round of reform, an institutional mechanism needs to be established for basic scientific research and the links between scientific innovations and the development of the real economy should be smoothed.

The past 40 years of reform and opening-up have made China prosperous and improved the lives of its people. What President Xi said in his Guangdong tour is a clarion call for a new round of reform and opening-up to make this country strong and powerful.