Premier Li: Build China into an innovation-driven country

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China will encourage innovation as the world's second largest economy presses forward with structural reforms, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said on Monday.

"We will continue to build China into an innovation-driven country by using innovative concepts, growing new economy and fostering new growth," Li said when addressing the opening ceremony of the Annual Meeting of the New Champions 2016, or the Summer Davos Forum, in north China's port city of Tianjin.

The country's promotion of innovation will bring together innovative activities by people from both the “elite circles” of society and the “grass-root” levels, online and offline, as well as business and research institutes, the premier further explained.

China's 13th Five-Year Plan, approved in March, outlined China's short-term development path, with growth driven by innovation, coordination, green development, opening-up and sharing.

"We will deeply promote mass entrepreneurship and innovation, combine elites and grass-roots online and offline, as well as enterprises and research institutes to form a new power for innovation,” he said. 

China now hosts more than 2,500 "incubators" for high-tech businesses and about 4,000 innovation bases. Incubators are business areas designed to help new business ventures. China also saw a record number of startups in 2015 as nearly 4.5 million companies were established, up more than a fifth on the previous year. 

Meanwhile, despite the short-term fluctuations in growth “during transition”, Premier Li said that the Chinese economy will not suffer a "hard landing".

"We can deliver the major targets of economic and social development set for 2016. Chinese economy continued to grow stably in the second quarter of the year, following a 6.7 percent expansion in the first three months”, he said. 


Around 1,700 policy-makers, entrepreneurs, scholars and media representatives from over 90 countries and regions are attending the forum this year. They will discuss the hottest topics from Asia's economic outlook, and China's 5-Year Plan, to the disruptive forces behind much of today's changing economic climate, during the three-day event.