A chief economist at Morgan Stanley on Friday said he believes some "science fiction" industries, as well as the next generation of manufacturing will be among key sectors driving China's high-quality growth.

The comments came after Premier Li Qiang unveiled the country's new growth targets for 2026 at the opening of the National People's Congress on Thursday.

Speaking in an interview with broadcaster CGTN, Robin Xing, chief China economist at the American investment bank, said that the nation's economy and supply chains have shown resilience over the past five years, despite global trade disruptions.

Looking ahead, he expressed the belief that the country's rapidly advancing technology and innovation sectors would be the emerging industries to supercharge high-quality growth.

"So things like intelligent equipment, advanced materials, and robotics integrated with AI [can] raise productivity. Also, on green upgrades, basically the ultra-high voltage (UHV) power grid enabled by energy storage [can] make the energy transition even faster to achieve carbon reduction," he said.

China has been adopting power transmission technology since 2009 to build a network of UHV lines. It is seen as crucial to building a greener future, and the country plans to put into operation another 15 UHV transmission lines between this year and 2030.

Xing added: "I would be also interested in some of those future industries, which sound a little bit 'sci-fi' right now, but they have been identified from the next Five-Year Plan as the sectors for the future."

"Things like human brain-machine interface, and also nuclear diffusion, 6G network, quantum computing, and AI adoption. All these are showing very promising micro positives for... entrepreneurs and talents to continue to work on during the next Five-Year Plan."

Separately, Xing noted that the country's new annual target of having the economy grow by a range of between 4.5 and five percent this year is reasonable, given uncertain external factors.

He believes the country can deliver the goal with targeted fiscal support, as well as stronger coordination between fiscal and monetary policies.


Edited by Aaron Tam