In his keynote speech at the CDF, Zhang Gaoli, one of the seven members of the Politburo Standing Committee (the Chinese Communist Party’s highest decision-making body), declared that the senior leadership has rendered the “strategic judgment that China’s economy has entered the stage of the new normal.” Yet, at the CDF’s wrap-up session, Premier Li Keqiang suggested, a bit less decisively, that China is basically following the world economy in its transition to a new normal.