The establishment of a socialist market economy had quickened China’s pace in economic construction, a Japanese scholar said in an exclusive interview with Xinhua.

Takashi Sekiyama, a research fellow of the government-related think tank, the Tokyo Foundation, was responding to a question about major adjustments in China’s economic policy over the 60 years since the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

“China has witnessed marked ups and downs in its drive for economic growth due to changes in its economic system, and the rapid economic growth following the adoption of the policy of reform and opening up (in 1978) accurately reflected how policy changes promote economic development,” Sekiyama said.

“China had been practising the system of a centrally planned economy until 1978 when it adopted the policy of reform and opening up and, over the 30 years since, China has achieved an annual economic growth of 9.8 percent, compared with the average growth rate of 3 percent for the rest of the world,” he said.

“China has achieved historically unprecedented economic growth by resolutely and ingeniously resorting to market forces,” the scholar noted.

Lauding the steps and measures taken by the Chinese government in building the system of a socialist market economy, Sekiyama said China has staged a series of reforms, including those aimed at reforming State-owned enterprises, separating the functions of government from those of enterprises and revitalizing the non-State sector of the economy, in a bid to establish and grow the socialist market economy.

On the contribution that China’s economic growth has made to the world economy, he said that, since 1978, the Chinese government had adjusted an imbalance in the industrial structure, made great efforts to develop labor-intensive industries with comparative advantages, and opened up to the outer world.

“As the world’s third largest economy, China has sustained a relatively rapid growth rate amid the fallout of the global financial crisis, which took a heavy toll on major economies of the world,” the scholar said.

“China and Asian nations, including Japan, have become increasingly interdependent and, from the perspective of the world economy, China’s economic growth in itself is a valuable contribution to the world,” Sekiyama said.