Abstract: China’s economy has a solid foundation, many advantages, strong resilience, and great potential. The supporting conditions and fundamental trend for its long-term sound development remain unchanged. However, it also faces major challenges, externally from suppression by the United States and the West, and internally from population decline, insufficient effective demand, and imbalanced development. In addition to adopting general guidelines and policy measures, it is necessary to formulate unconventional strategies based on China’s real advantages and to solve problems by looking beyond the problems themselves: Carry out robust supportive policies for fertility, so as to stabilize the number of newborns, turn population growth from negative to positive, and address the lack of development momentum and confidence caused by sustained negative population growth; coordinating economic and social policies to forcefully promote the recovery of the real estate market in central cities, thereby boosting consumption and investment demand; establishing a mechanism through which the people as a whole share the returns on state-owned assets, creating a common pension, and building a uniquely Chinese mixed pension system, which would not only substantially narrow the excessively large benefit gaps among different basic old-age insurance schemes—an important manifestation of imbalanced development—but also expand domestic demand and spur economic growth. By adopting such unconventional strategies to overcome the major obstacles to China’s economic and social development, upholding the expansion of domestic demand as a strategic basis, and boosting the dynamism and reliability of the domestic economy, China can maintain favorable long-term expectations and development momentum.

Key words: population, real estate, common pension, common debt, unconventional strategies