Webinar series 2025 / new CMG Primer + Read-out webinar / Digital recruiting event / CMG’s recent business trip to Beijing

With this CMG Insight #25, the old and new US President Donald Trump is back in office. As per his first actions being back in charge, it appears as if the widely announced tariffs on PRC imports may be at least postponed until April 1st, the deadline for a series of US-government internal trade reviews and investigations launched by Trump. Nevertheless, Beijing understands what may come, and has been preparing at least since the “Third Plenum” held in July last year.?

To make sense of Beijing’s view and priorities going into 2025, CMG has put together a New CMG Primer: “Understanding China’s economy into 2025 – evolved development strategy, reform priorities and short-term macroeconomic management”.

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Key items in today’s edition:?

• Webinars: we are happy to announce the 4th edition of the “Staying in Dialogue with China” webinar series, starting with Prof. DA Wei from Tsinghua University on 26th February – register below ?

• Publication: Check out our new CMG Primer “Understanding China’s economy into 2025 – evolved development strategy, reform priorities and short-term macroeconomic management” and register for our read-out webinar next week Tuesday?
• Analytical digest: our 5 points summarizing Vice-Premier Ding Xuexiang’s speech at the WEF
• Recruiting: CMG hosts its 1st Digital Recruiting Event this year on 5th February 2025 for the Associate program plus Analyst position applicants – apply below until 29th January 2025

• Corporate news: CMG in Beijing ?

?As always: Send us your feedback and questions to?[email protected].?We look forward to hearing from you! Thanks also for forwarding CMG Insight to friends and colleagues who you think could be interested in CMG’s work.

“Staying in Dialogue with China” webinar series 2025

We are happy to announce the 4th edition of the 2025 “Staying in dialogue with China” webinar series, a Europe-China initiative meant to provide access to relevant, high-level and articulate Chinese and China-based viewpoints on key domestic policy and economic as well as foreign policy and geopolitical issues for European decision-making and interested audiences.?

The theme of this year’s edition is China’s upcoming 15th Five-Year-Plan (FYP, 2026-2030) and we curate again six webinars with six distinct angles on the main theme. The 15th FYP is being drafted these months with its outline (纲要建议) communicated foreseeably in October 2025 after the 20th Central Committee’s Fifth Plenum endorses it and then the full plan will be formally decided and published at the NPC in March 2026.?

So far, aside from a brief mention of the 15th FYP by the CEWC last December, the NDRC is most vocal about the 15th FYP: in December 2023, it provided aninterim official review of the 14th FYP’s execution, flagging six key hurdles (堵点) and highlighting two specific goals lagging in execution (green and childcare). Plus, since January (1st round of 26) and March (2nd round of 16) 2024, the NDRC has cumulatively published 42 research callsacross eight key buckets we observe to help prepare the drafting of the 15th FYP (cf. slide below).

For our first webinar in this new series, we are pleased to welcome DA Wei, Director of the Center for International Security and Strategy (CISS) and Professor of International Relations at Tsinghua University in Beijing. The webinar with Prof. DA is titled “Dealing with Trump 2.0 - is China making tactical or strategic adjustments in view of the 15th Five-Year-Plan?”. The webinar takes place on 26th February 2025 at 9am CET / 4pm CST for which you can register below. We will also continuously add the dates of the forthcoming webinars and keep you updated with CMG Insight and our LinkedIn communication.?

For business organizations, trade associations, chambers, business schools or other interested institutions based especially in Europe or China interested in partnering with us to provide access to the content of this webinar series to your respective membership and network, kindly reach out to Markus at [email protected] to learn about our attractive collaboration terms.

Webinar #1: Prof. DA Wei on Dealing with Trump 2.0 - is China making tactical or strategic adjustments in view of the 15th Five-Year Plan?

Wednesday, 26th February 2025, 9-945am CET / 4-445pm CST

Register here

New CMG Primer and read-out webinar on Tuesday coming week

CMG’s newest CMG Primer publication, titled “Understanding China’s economy into 2025 – evolved development strategy, reform priorities and short-term macroeconomic management”, wants to provide our clients, current and new readers with a holistic and coherent interpretation of what is going on strategically in China’s economy into 2025 from a foreign business perspective because of the crucial timing at the start of the year with a slow post-Covid economic recovery now coinciding with Donald Trump’s return to the White House for his second term as US President.?

A core point that this new publication argues is that the CCP’s key reform meeting the “Third Plenum” held last year in July took its decisions for the scenario of Donald Trump being re-elected and focused on accelerating China’s reforms and opening-up to both the least developed economies and more broadly non-US nations, in fact doubling down on the “high-level opening up” policy direction based on the Dual Circulation formalized with the 14th Five-Year-Plan in March 2021 and enshrined into the CCP constitution at the 20th Party Congress in October 2022, while starting to actively seek opportunities in pluri- or multilateral formats.?

Domestically, our publication highlights key reform priorities including China’s socialist market economy or the “New Quality Productive Forces” (NQPF). Thereby, NQPF needs to be seen as a new principle in China’s overarching economic policymaking that seeks to better link China’s S&T/innovation- (tech-focused) to its industrial policymaking (economic value creation-focused) through better integrating the “industry-academic-research” chain, stretching its ambition for future industries and providing a new lasting top-level rationale for China’s quest to increase the contribution of innovation (i.e. Total-Factor-Productivity, or TFP) to China’s future GDP growth.?

In terms of China’s short-term macroeconomic management, we spotted a changed tone since July Politburo meeting shifting the focus more on reviving growth dynamism than structural reforms, with bolder counter-cyclical interventions introduced since September 2024 incl. the strongest monetary easing since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) to counter the economy’s heightened downward pressure. Consistent with policymakers focus on the “supply side” in the post-pandemic period – except for the CEWC 2022 –, the intervention is explicitly clarified to be merely a short-term “fix” (校正), while the long-term policy focus remains to be structural reforms for economic transition. First indicators of these interventions as per December 2024 show initial positive trends for both demand and supply side.?

The publication ends on sharing CMG’s high-level view – based on its past and ongoing client cases – on the state of European business’ strategic decision-making related to the Chinese market, and also highlights how our value proposition is defined in a way to support European business precisely responding to the key challenges we perceive and describe.

Download new CMG Primer

Read-out webinar: China's economy into 2025

Understanding China's economy into 2025 - evolved development strategy,

reform priorities and short-term macroeconomic management

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Tuesday, 28th January 2025

9-10am CET/ 4-5pm CST?

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Sign-up here to join our CMG read-out webinar with Alex Zheng Zhou, Senior Analyst, and Markus Herrmann, Co-Founder and Managing Director of CMG, presenting on behalf of the CMG team. Also feel free to submit in-advance questions related to our new CMG Primer by mail to [email protected].

Review of Vice-Premier Ding Xuexiang’s speech at the WEF’s Annual Meeting 2025

Vice-Premier Ding, at the helm of China’s delegation traveling to Davos this year, delivered a speech lasting only slightly longer than twenty minutes but which should be taken note of as it summarizes some important developments in China’s domestic policymaking, especially since last year’s “Third Plenum” reform meeting and – implicitly – shedding light into how China at the beginning of 2025 seeks to respond strategically to Trump 2.0.?

Below we flag five key points which we find relevant for foreign business to take note:?

• (1) First, Ding mentioned China’s intent to help “third countries” (各国) develop emerging and future industries – via building new-type infrastructure incl. AI, smart transportation or smart energy – in line with Beijing’s new overarching economic policymaking principle of developing “New-quality productive forces”, which is meant to drive integration of the innovation value-chain and help increase China’s TFP. Pushing this interpretation further, this means that China’s ongoing efforts of engaging with “Global South” countries under the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative, will see a broadening towards exporting “new-type” of infrastructure, thus drawing on Chinese corporate capabilities beyond EPCs.
• (2) On China’s economy, Ding described the key challenges faced while framing the deteriorated external environment plus the trade-off effects from China’s structural reforms as key root-causes. He also reiterated China’s current policy stance of “effectively pursuing higher-quality economic growth and appropriately increasing economic output” (推动经济实现质的有效提升和量的合理增长). This is in line with especially Pan Gongsheng’s speech in late October last year which we see as the most explicit and “didactic” clarification that Chinese leaders know that short-term growth is the prerequisite to sustain China’s longer-term structural reforms. Based on this, Chinese government took counter-cyclical macroeconomic interventions in September and October last year which Pan framed as a short-term “fix” (校正).
• (3) Next, although at the risk of being overheard by the international business community, we think that VP Ding gave very good examples – shortened FDI negative list from 190 items in 2013 to 29 in 2024, full removal of FDI barriers in the manufacturing sector, trade of service governance changed to negative list-approach, as well as the opening-up of more sectors including telecom, medical and education – accelerated opening-up efforts by China with special emphasis on least developed countries. We think that the “Third Plenum” held in July 2024 decided a variety of reforms including opening-up measures already under the conscious premise of Trump’s re-election, thus casting a strategic response to Tump 2.0.
• (4) On trade, we think it is noteworthy that Ding stated that China does not seek “trade surpluses” but is willing to import more good-quality products and services to reach better balance. Referring to President Xi’s earliest commitment in this same reign at the 4th CIIE in 2021 to develop towards more balanced trade relations (促进贸易平衡发展) ?, China has indeed been trying to increase its share in global total imports with a 0.1% YOY increase for the first three quarters in 2024, reaching 10.5% of global total imports.
• (5) Finally, on China’s business environment for foreign capital, Ding stressed many measures that China is working on to improve this environment. He reiterated, in line with our interpretation of the core take-away from the “Third Plenum” last year, that different capital forms shall henceforth be treated more equally in China’s economy, and gave the draft definition of what “Made in China” means in context of public procurement processes as an implementation example. He was clear-eyed on a host of implementation issues still persisting such as “invisible barriers and hidden hurdles” and invited foreign business to actively work with Chinese government to implement these reform measures.

To sum up, we think that in terms of content – without explaining the respective underlying strategic goals that China is pursuing and expanding more on what implementation complexities China is facing when announcing such reforms – Vice-Premier tried to use the global stage offered to China by this year’s WEF in Davos to make the case for many critical reforms that are ongoing and we think foreign business should take note of.

CMG Associate program – 1st Digital Recruiting Event 2025

Join our upcoming Digital Recruiting Event on February 5th 2025, the first out of three events in 2025, and discover CMG’s Associate program.?

Our Associate program offers 3-6 months engagements with a possible one-time extension of up to six months, acting as a gateway for ambitious young professionals with relevant skills and experience to launch their careers with us and gain China research and consulting expertise.?

Read the full description of program, role and requirements of the CMG Associate program here.?

Find all further information on chinamacro.ch/career, and send us your full application documents before January 29!

CMG in Beijing

At the start of the year, between 8-16th January 2025, part of the CMG team traveled to Beijing for a business trip. Besides various client meetings and briefing interactions with the European diplomatic community in Beijing, it was our pleasure to contribute to three public events hosted by the European Chamber of Commerce in China (EUCCC), the Danish Chamber of Commerce in China (DCCC) and the SwissCham respectively.?

The exact curation of our briefings varied across these events but broadly revolved around the content of our newest CMG Primer “Understanding China’s economy into 2025 – evolved developments strategy, reform priorities and short-term macroeconomic management”, which you can download on our website and sign-up for our read-out webinar coming Tuesday (cf. above in this CMG Insight) if of interest.??

We are thankful for these collaborations and invite interested business organizations especially based in China and across Europe to reach out to us to discuss opportunities for CMG to contribute to events for your membership.?

Shortly after the business trip, our MD Markus joined an online webinar held on 21st January 2025 hosted by the China-Britain Business Council (CBBC) and moderated by its Chief China Representative Tom Simpson, after the UK-China Economic and Financial Dialogue (EFD) was successfully reactivated on 11th January 2025, led by the Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves on the UK side. A recording of this webinar will be made available later by CBBC, we will re-share through our corporate account on LinkedIn.