Editor's note: Is China socialist or capitalist? Late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping once said, a cat just needs to catch a mouse – its color doesn't matter. See how China's institutional flexibility taps the maximum potentiality for the country's development.

"It doesn't matter if a cat is black or white so long as it catches mice."

The late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping's words go straight to the truth of China's rapid growth – the country has chosen a development path that suits its actual conditions.

In the early days of development, the planned economy enabled China to pool the resources needed to build a national industrial system.

But as China entered a new developmental stage, it shifted focus to opening-up to drive its industrialization to a higher level.

"The success of this transition has been to move away from planning toward market but recognizing that the market economy is not perfect. And that's where the state comes in to guide it, to push it, to create incentives, to cool it down when it gets too hot, or to warm it up when it gets too cold," Laurence Brahm, senior research fellow at Center for China and Globalization, said in an interview with CGTN.

For China, development, not ideology, is the hard truth. The country is combining the visible hand of the government and the invisible hand of the market to tap the maximum potentiality for development.

Ideology is not the only criterion in determining China's path. This institutional flexibility has made the whole system in China dynamic, test-based and forward-looking, and has turned the Chinese people into the final arbiter of reform and experiments in all walks of life.

Unlike some Western countries where the need to ensure political correctness outweighs people's interests, the ultimate aim of the political system in China is to serve people. The system changes to adapt to the country's changing situations and people's changing needs.

"The communism we see in China today is much closer to what Sun Yat-sen would call 民生主义 (mínshēng zhǔyì') – the livelihood of the people, taking people's livelihood as the center. This is what former Premier Wen Jiabao used to say in a different way, 以人为本 (yǐrénwéiběn) – have people as your foundation," William Kirby, professor at Harvard University, said.

China's system takes people's livelihood as the core. As Deng said, a cat just needs to catch a mouse – its color doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if the system is perceived as socialist or capitalist so long as it can satisfy people's needs.

Such institutional flexibility has saved Chinese people from poverty as well as political and ideological hair-splitting, and instilled the strong spirit of pragmatism, realism and hard work in the Chinese people. This paved the way for China's rise into a major power.

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