China's next phase of growth

While China's manufacturing sector has been the core engine which has driven global growth for the past number of decades, the domestically-led industrial economic model that China has used is changing.

The emergence of online e-commerce platforms like Alibaba and JD.com are perhaps the most obvious examples of this transformation.

"I have a lot of respect for the tenacity and entrepreneurialism that China has tackled the online market with," CEO of Australia's leading data innovation group Data 61, Adrian Turner, told the forum.

"They began by using western technology and innovating around business models and not the other way round."

The success of these digital giants has not only revolutionized the retail space for both buyers and sellers in the marketplace, but the development of the underlying technology appears to have awoken the country and given its digital creators a new found confidence on the world stage.

"In mid 2017 China came out and said, we are going to be the leader in artificial intelligence," Turner said.

"By 2030, they think it's going to be a 150-billion-dollar market in China. They think it's going to reframe the basis of competition worldwide and add a trillion dollars to China's GDP."

It seems that venture capitalists agree, with investment into China's AI startup sector eclipsing those in the United States.

And with this increase in "high value growth" and productivity, a sharp rise in domestic personal income is invariably set to follow.

"The combination of talent, of wealth, of infrastructure, of manufacturing capability, research and development and design capability is quite unique and all of that has the effect of creating consumption," director of the McKinsey Global Institute in China, Jonathan Woetzel, told the summit.

"And those new consumers in China, the new middle class, are importantly very different from today's middle class, they have different tastes, different expectations and different price points."

"So there is a huge new wave of consumption about to break over the world and of course Australia knows that better than anywhere else."

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