Data released by the National Bureau of Statistics on January 19 show China's GDP reached 140.19 trillion yuan ($20.01 trillion) in 2025, maintaining stable growth at about 5 percent for the third consecutive year.

Over the past year, in the face of complex changes in the domestic and global environments and mounting economic pressure, the Chinese Government, through sound decision-making and planning, ensured that the national economy pushed forward with innovation-led, high-quality development, making and meeting many new targets.

This new milestone of growth was reached in the wake of a profound shift in China's economic philosophy and during the resulting period of economic transition. For decades, China pursued rapid expansion through passive reliance on external trade, before making a switch in 2017 toward the pursuit of high-quality development.

Since the introduction of the reform and opening-up policy in the late 1970s, China has created a remarkable growth miracle. However, as the efficiency of traditional factor-drive growth—growth derived from resources, labor and capital—diminishes and the constraints of resources and environment intensify, the core of China's economic growth has shifted from growing bigger to growing stronger and growing better, from being dominated by cement and steel to being dominated by AI and biotechnology, and from being labor-driven to being intelligence-driven.

The new economic drivers powering China's transition toward economic resilience are known as new quality productive forces. They include strategic emerging industries such as new energy, new materials, advanced manufacturing and digital and information technologies. Maintaining stable 5-percent growth reflects not only sound economic management, but also the many scientific and technological breakthroughs that are making these new quality productive forces a success.

China is also switching toward reliance on internal momentum to drive the economy. It is doing so not only in the pursuit of greater resilience amid global economic instability, but also as part of its system-wide deepening of people-centered governance. The new impetus for growth in this new stage stems from the aspiration of over 1.4 billion people for a better quality of life, which requires the supply system to shift from producing what is consumed to creating what is needed.

As global economic growth slows and remains uneven and uncertain, China's transition is encouraging not only for the people of the country, but for all those whose livelihoods are connected to China's economy.