What fascinates me most about China's deepening reform practices is the emphasis on driving a shift to new quality productive forces. This will be among the top priorities for China's policymakers to promote high-quality development over the next few years.

As the economy is transitioning from a phase of rapid growth to a new phase of high-quality development, the country is shifting its focus to emerging industries, creating new business models and fostering new growth drivers in a bid to promote the development of productive forces featuring high technology, high performance and high quality.

China will improve the institutions and mechanisms to foster new quality productive forces in line with local conditions, according to the resolution on further deepening reform in a comprehensive fashion to advance Chinese modernization, which was adopted at the recently concluded third plenary session of the 20th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China.

The country will work to facilitate revolutionary breakthroughs in technology, innovative allocation of production factors, in-depth industrial transformation and upgrading, and the optimal combination of laborers, means of labor and subjects of labor as well as their renewal and upgrading, the resolution said.

After years of development, China has gained a competitive edge in fostering new quality productive forces featuring new economic models, new businesses and new industries, bolstered by the blossoming cutting-edge technologies, such as the internet of things and innovation in the digital economy, said He Xuming, chairman of the World Internet of Things Convention executive committee.

He told a recent meeting in Beijing that the booming IoT and digital economy will inject strong impetus into the economy, saying more efforts should be made to speed up the digital transformation and boost the innovative applications of digital technologies.

The scale of China's digital economy topped 50 trillion yuan ($6.9 trillion) in 2022, second in the world and accounting for over 40 percent of the country's GDP, according to a report released from the Cyberspace Administration of China.

He noted that while the United States, with a digital economy worth over $14 trillion, ranks first in the world, China will likely overtake the size of the US digital economy by 2026 given its accelerated push for boosting the digital economy growth.

Last year, the country issued a guideline on the construction of a digital China, which will serve as an important engine for boosting its modernization drive in the digital era and provide solid support for the development of a new competitive edge.

By 2035, China will be at the forefront of digital development globally, and its digital progress in certain aspects of economy, politics, culture, society and ecology will be more coordinated and sustained, according to the plan.

Wang Yiming, vice-chairman of the China Center for International Economic Exchanges and former deputy director of the Development Research Center of the State Council, highlighted the importance of improving systems that facilitate the deep integration of the real economy and the digital economy.

"Data are the core production factor in the digital economy era," he said. "It is necessary to accelerate the cultivation of emerging production factor markets such as data, establish and improve basic systems for data property rights, transactions, income distribution and security governance, and better release the potential of data factors to drive high-quality development."

To foster the new quality productive forces, more efforts should be made to create a fairer and more dynamic market environment, innovate ways of allocating production factors, promote the efficient flow and optimized combination of production factors, and improve the basic market economic systems like property rights protection, market access, fair competition and social credit, he said.