David Ferguson: Effective planning guiding China towards comprehensive modernization

"One of the great strengths of China's system is 'continuity'," says David Ferguson, a Scottish writer, journalist and the English editor of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China, in an interview with Guangming Online. During the interview, David Ferguson attributes the great success China has achieved over the past decade to the country's impressive planning capability, calling it "one of the fundamental reasons" behind China's remarkable achievements.

Aside from "continuity", David Ferguson also points out that China's development plans are characterized by specificity, which guides the execution of China’s plans and ensures the realization of its long-term goals. China's development process, as Ferguson observes, "is very specifically defined" as "open, shared, innovative, green and coordinated," and each of these criteria again has specific definitions of its own.

Speaking of "shared development", Ferguson explains the linkage between this succinct and seemingly small concept and China’s extensive poverty alleviation efforts. A very small box in the overall context of Xi Jinping’s Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, the concept of "shared development" nonetheless involves such massive undertakings as poverty alleviation, which reveals China’s development process as one that features a sound structure: it is "very high-level", but "when it gets down to the grassroots it involves millions of people taking concrete actions", says Ferguson.

Ferguson also cites China’s Second Centenary Goal as another example that showcases such specificity. Whilst generally defined as turning China into a modern socialist country, the Second Centenary Goal is also more specifically defined as a set of specific criteria. "As time passes, and as we move forward, new ideas will emerge, new policies will be enacted, and the criteria of the Second Centenary Goal will take on greater definition," says Ferguson as he expresses his expectations for China on the way to achieving comprehensive modernization.