A humanoid robot demonstrates a toast-making service at the 2025 Digital Intelligence Technology Ecosystem Conference in Guangzhou, South China's Guangdong Province, on December 5, 2025. Photo: VCG

Underscoring demand-driven development, reform breakthroughs, technology empowerment as well as opening up and cooperation, Chinese President Xi Jinping called for carrying out capacity-expanding and quality-upgrading initiatives in the service sector. Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, has also called for striving to break new ground in the high-quality development of China's service sector.

President Xi recently issued important instructions on the development of the service sector, thoroughly explaining the major significance, key principles and priority tasks for promoting its high-quality and efficient development. The instructions clarify the guiding principles for advancing the development of the sector and further deepen the Communist Party of China (CPC)'s understanding of the underlying laws governing the building of a modern industrial system, providing a scientific guide for promoting the high-quality and efficient development of the service sector.

Strategic significance 

Making solid efforts to open up new prospects for the high-quality development of the service sector is crucial to current economic and social development, the overall advancement of Chinese modernization, and has major strategic significance.

As economic and social development advances and residents' incomes rise, the service sector is playing an increasingly important role in the country's overall development.

The service sector has become the nation's main driver of economic growth. 

During the 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021-25), the value added of China's service sector crossed three successive 10-trillion-yuan ($1.46 trillion) thresholds, surpassing 80 trillion yuan in 2025. In 2015, the sector's share of GDP exceeded 50 percent for the first time and has continued to edge up steadily since then, reaching 57.7 percent in 2025. It now contributes more than 60 percent of the country's economic growth.

The service sector serves as a catalyst for technological innovation and a multiplier of manufacturing value. Producer services have played an indispensable role in helping China's manufacturing sector retain the world's largest overall scale for 16 consecutive years.

In addition, the service sector serves as a source of employment and a stabilizing force. With its wide range of segments, broad scope, flexible formats and strong capacity to absorb labor, the sector plays a significant role in job creation. New occupations such as on-demand delivery workers and business data analysts continue to emerge, creating fresh employment opportunities. 

By the end of 2024, employment in the service sector had reached 360 million, accounting for 48.8 percent of the national total.

As global economic uncertainty rises and China's economy enters a critical stage of transformation and upgrading, promoting the high-quality and efficient development of the service sector is both significant and timely.

Promoting the high-quality and efficient development of the services sector will strongly support China's manufacturing upgrade from scale to strength and help it move up both ends of the value chain, in line with the "smile curve."

Meanwhile, whether by advancing the high-end, intelligent and green development of manufacturing, or by adapting to consumer trends toward higher quality, greater personalization and more premium offerings, promoting the high-quality and efficient development of the service sector will continue to create new drivers of economic growth.

Promoting the high-quality and efficient development of the service sector will not only better meet people's daily needs, but also create more high-quality jobs, thereby better fulfilling people's aspirations for a better life and providing strong momentum for advancing Chinese modernization.

High-quality development

Expanding capacity and improving quality is the key path to promoting the high-quality and efficient development of the service sector.

"Expanding capacity" means addressing supply-demand gaps across different service sectors by increasing supply, continuously fostering new growth drivers for the services industry and new space for trade in services, and enhancing the sector's overall development level.

"Improving quality" means being guided by demand, deepening reform, leveraging technology, and expanding opening-up and cooperation, while strengthening standardization to raise the service sector's level of digitalization, integration and internationalization, and accelerate its move toward the high end of the industrial and value chains.

To better promote the high-quality and efficient development of the service sector, it is essential to stay guided by demand, advance producer services toward the high end in line with the needs of the real economy, and steer consumer services toward new forms and upgrades based on people's daily needs.

In recent years, reforms in China's service sector have deepened across the board, with hidden restrictions in areas such as factor access, resource allocation and government procurement steadily easing. However, institutional and structural obstacles remain, including inconsistent standards and local protectionism.

To better promote the high-quality and efficient development of the service sector, efforts should focus on key areas and critical links, accelerate the building of a unified national market, strike a balance between market vitality and effective regulation, facilitate the free flow of service-related factors, and improve resource allocation efficiency in the service sector.

Technology empowerment

At present, a new generation of information technologies represented by artificial intelligence, big data and the industrial internet is advancing rapidly in both breakthroughs and applications, empowering a wide range of industries and reaching households across the country.

To better promote the high-quality and efficient development of the services sector, it is essential to take technological innovation as a key driver, use it to drive industrial innovation, advance the deep integration and coordinated innovation of manufacturing, service and digital technologies, and foster both qualitative improvement and reasonable quantitative growth in the service sector.

To open up new prospects for the high-quality development of the service sector, we must remain focused, work steadily, stay committed to expanding capacity and improving quality, and steadily advance the key tasks for service sector development.

As digitalization, green development and intelligent transformation continue to deepen, producer services are entering a period of strategic opportunity marked by both scale expansion and structural upgrading. 

With a focus on sectors such as technology services, digital and intelligent services, business services, modern logistics and financial services, China should systematically improve the quality and efficiency of producer service supply and build a modern industrial system with greater resilience and competitiveness.

In addition, consumer services are geared toward meeting people's needs throughout the life cycle and represent an important link for improving livelihoods, expanding domestic demand and stabilizing growth.

Meanwhile, China also needs to foster more "China services" brands. This is driven by both practical demand and growing technological and industrial strength. 

As China's service sector advances technologically and the domestic market for service consumption continues to expand, the country should keep improving the sector's digitalization, standardization, integration and internationalization, and gradually build globally recognized "China services" brands.

As China moves through the 15th Five-Year Plan period (2026-30), by fostering a sound approach to development and deeply implementing the initiative to expand capacity and improve quality in the services sector, the high-quality development of the service industry will open up promising new horizons.

This was compiled from an article originally published on the front page of the People's Daily on April 10, 2026.