Editor's note: Radhika Desai, a special commentator for CGTN, is a professor of political studies at the University of Manitoba in Canada. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

China's government work report, summarizing the accomplishments of the past year and the plans for the next, announced a series of targets at the National People's Congress, China's top legislature. The major ones are growth between 4.5% and 5% with instructions to strive for better outcomes, re-orientation to high-quality growth from speed-first growth, 7% annual growth in research and development expenditure, among others.

Such ambition is surely commendable. But not if it's China. The Western press flaunted its schadenfreude with headlines like "China Signals New Era of Slower Economic Growth" (Wall Street Journal) or "China sets lowest GDP growth target for decades" (The Guardian). However, even a cursory look at the reality should wipe the malicious smiles off their front pages.  

Let's start with the "low" growth target. Over recent years, the Western press has been celebrating India as "the fastest growing major economy." However, India's growth rates are not credible. India's former chief economic advisor Arvind Subramanian is the latest prominent economist to insist that India's widely-advertised growth rates of over 6% must be discounted by at least 2.5 percentage points, leaving it below China's, a more mature economy growing from a base nearly five times as large.  

There is more. With growth falling around the world, not to mention the emergency of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution, China's planners are ahead of the curve, re-orienting China from quantitative to qualitative growth.  

The latter includes a better living environment, greater social security, better education, health care, transportation and social services, advancing culture and developing "new quality productive forces."  

That last is critical to dealing with another canard about China and its growth, that 'China will grow old before it gets rich.' While, undoubtedly, China is aging, so are most countries, especially Western ones. However, unlike them, China has a far better apparatus for coping with the resulting challenges – an effective market and a capable government. 

There are two ways of growing: by improving the productivity of existing workers or by adding new workers. The former requires investment and innovation. China's planners recognize this. Their high investment levels have generated the breathtaking growth of the past many decades. They will continue to remain high. 

At the same time, China attaches great importance to developing new quality productive forces, including green technology, information technology and artificial intelligence, pharma, space, nano and other technologies. The results have been spectacular, whether in the form of putting China in the forefront of leading research, university expansion, patent issuance, or various technological breakthroughs, such as DeepSeek's achievements.

According to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute's Critical Technology Tracker, China is in the forefront of 57 of 64 critical technologies it has been tracking since 2003, up from just three.  

Meanwhile, the West is the mirror opposite. Its innovation and investment rates have bumped along the bottom and as a result of the economic decline that has resulted from this woeful investment and innovation performance, it cannot even pursue growth by adding workers: the immigration necessary for that has been made difficult for most Western societies by their very economic predicament. It has generated a toxic politics of scapegoating the very immigrants on which Western growth now depends.  

Provided China is successful in the qualitative reorientation of its growth pattern, it can blaze the trail for a new conception of the good life for a world that has reached the end of the line of Western lifestyle of excessive consumption based on the exploitation of workers and subordinated countries and the depletion of culture and nature.  

If anything can succeed, it is China's planning apparatus. It has proved its resilience and adaptability for ever newer challenges over the past 75 years and counting.  

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