The 2026 NetEase Economists Annual Conference, held in Beijing in December 2025, gathered a cross‑section of officials, academics and corporate chiefs to argue that China’s next phase of growth must be driven by plurality and mutualism rather than single‑track fixes. Organisers cast the forum under the banner "Diversity · Symbiosis", using the term as a shorthand for policy that creates spaces for multiple actors — state, private enterprise and social organisations — to co‑evolve rather than compete under zero‑sum rules.
Speakers ranged from senior policy figures and former ministry officials to technology and manufacturing executives. Common themes recurred: a call for policy to shift from command and control to guidance that fosters ecosystem integration; a recognition that firm competitiveness will increasingly depend on the ability to orchestrate diverse partners; and a warning that the rapid pace of technological change upends single‑skill careers and public expectations.
Several high‑level interventions set the meeting’s practical agenda. A senior member of the NPC standing committee argued that lifting consumption requires systemic changes — bolstering social security accounts, using ultra‑long government bonds to support retirement incomes, clearing policy obstacles to spending, shifting some tax burdens from production to consumption and encouraging enterprises to supply more targeted services. He urged coordination between investment in physical capital and investment in people so that human capital improvement, consumption upgrading and industrial restructuring form a reinforcing loop.
On trade policy and geopolitics, a former finance ministry deputy minister warned that unilateral tariff measures by the United States in 2025 have fractured the reciprocity at the heart of the WTO and could push the international trade system back toward a bilateral, negotiated patchwork. Other analysts on the panel argued that 2026 may see a relative stabilisation of U.S.‑China competition — a managed coexistence underpinned by negotiations and crisis management — but stressed that friction will remain a central external risk for China’s Fifteenth Five‑Year planning period.
Technology and labour were discussed from an unusually philosophical angle by a leading technology officer, who compared the effect of AI on cognition to the way industrial foodisation affected physical health: as machines take over repetitive tasks, human habits and capacities can atrophy. He insisted that whether AI replaces people is not a question about chips but about how societies choose to live and work, and how policy and firms invest in maintaining human agency and higher‑order skills.
Economists at the forum returned repeatedly to the problem of weak demand. One senior researcher traced the current pattern to "quantity up, price down", arguing that a collapse in expectations and confidence is a deeper cause than mechanical supply‑demand imbalance. The proposed remedies were institutional and distributive: more decisive redistribution through one‑off and recurring transfers for childcare and eldercare, income‑reform to reduce excess household savings, and liberalising service‑sector entry to boost employment absorption.
Investment and asset‑allocation advice from private wealth managers at the event pointed international investors to the United States for equity exposure, to high‑quality investment‑grade bonds for income, and to gold as a geopolitical hedge. That note of portfolio pragmatism sat beside domestic warnings that China must recalibrate from an investment‑led growth model to one where consumption and services play a larger, sustained role.
Panels on food safety and green transition emphasised different but related elements of resilience. Food‑science experts argued that legitimate food technology improves safety and supply reliability, and differentiated such innovation from criminal or fraudulent practices that generate public distrust. Meanwhile, green‑finance and corporate supply‑chain speakers described the hard work of turning compliance into value: the challenge of heterogeneous suppliers, the need for standardised digital templates, the creation of joint R&D platforms, and the technical difficulty of end‑to‑end traceability required by regulations such as the European Union’s battery rules.
Taken together, the conference articulated a pragmatic agenda for China’s near term: shore up household confidence through social policy and income reform, make services a durable engine of growth, manage external friction without decoupling, harness technology while protecting human capability, and accelerate credible green transition across supply chains. For global readers, the message is that Beijing is preparing to use policy levers and corporate engagement to pivot the economy from volume‑driven investment toward a more diversified, resilience‑focused model.