Think Tank

Continuously building a modern circulation system to resolve strong supply and weak demand

2026-03-18   

The 2025 Central Economic Work Conference scientifically analyzed the current economic situation and clearly pointed out that the contradiction between strong domestic supply and weak demand is prominent. This contradiction is mainly manifested as: on the one hand, China has the most complete and largest industrial system in the world, with sufficient supply and huge production capacity potential; On the other hand, the willingness of residents to consume and enterprises to invest needs to be boosted, and there is a mismatch between supply and demand in some areas, resulting in insufficient release of effective demand. In this context, a key task for doing a good job in this year's economic work is to "adhere to the leading role of domestic demand and build a strong domestic market". One of its core directions is to unblock the economic cycle bottlenecks and promote dynamic balance between supply and demand at a higher level. The modern circulation system is the "main artery" connecting the supply and demand sides, and its strategic role becomes increasingly prominent in the face of the prominent contradiction between strong supply and weak demand. It is not only a channel for the flow of goods and factors, but also the key to effectively solving the problem of coexistence of "supply but no demand" and "demand but no effective supply". An intelligent, open, and efficient modern circulation system that can keenly identify structural changes on the demand side, promote efficient matching, and stimulate potential demand; Being able to accurately and quickly feedback market demand signals to the supply side, guiding capacity optimization, product innovation, and industrial upgrading. Therefore, accelerating the construction of a modern circulation system is an effective measure to resolve the current contradiction between strong supply and weak demand, and to transform the advantages of a super large market and a complete industrial system into development advantages. The essence of solving the contradiction between strong supply and weak demand lies not in absolute oversupply or insufficient demand, but in the existence of "mismatch" and "obstruction" between supply and demand. The modern circulation system has powerful "adaptation" and "unblocking" functions, which can simultaneously exert force from both the supply and demand sides, promoting a higher level of dynamic balance between supply and demand. The modern circulation system can stimulate, match, and expand effective demand. Faced with the current situation of insufficient stage demand, the modern circulation system can transform potential consumption and investment intentions into tangible market orders through multi-level paths. One is to promote the conversion of potential demand into effective orders. The so-called 'weak demand' is partly manifested as consumers having needs but finding it difficult to find products that fully meet their preferences, budget, and quality expectations. The modern circulation system, especially the digital platform relying on technologies such as big data and artificial intelligence, can achieve precise matching of supply and demand. By analyzing consumer data, efficiently connecting massive, dispersed, and personalized consumer demands with the massive product categories on the supply side can greatly reduce consumers' search costs and decision-making difficulties, making it possible to "buy" and "buy right", thereby transforming a large number of potential and unmet needs into real purchasing behavior and directly digesting supply capacity. The second is to reduce transaction costs, create convenience, and enhance actual purchasing power and consumption tendency. High transaction costs (including circulation costs, time costs, selection costs, etc.) are important factors that suppress demand. The modern circulation system reduces logistics costs through large-scale operations, multimodal transport, and joint distribution; Reduce institutional costs by breaking down regional barriers and promoting competition; Enhance consumer convenience through instant retail, community e-commerce, and other means. These measures can enhance residents' actual purchasing power, lower the consumption threshold, fully unleash consumption willingness, and directly activate demand. The third is to create new demands and promote demand upgrading through innovative scenarios. Strong supply requires new market space to support it, and innovative circulation formats are the direct driving force for creating new demand. New scenarios in the fields of experiential consumption and integrated consumption of business, culture, and tourism can not only meet demand, but also stimulate and create unprecedented consumer interest. For example, innovative business models such as Pangdonglai have led a new trend in consumer upgrading, opened up market space for high-quality production capacity in related fields, and guided the "supply capacity" to an "effective supply" track that is in line with future trends. The modern circulation system can optimize and upgrade the supply structure. If the strong supply capacity is detached from market demand, it will evolve into excess pressure and resource waste. The modern circulation system directly affects the market supply and demand relationship, and has a strong pulling and forcing effect on the supply side. On the one hand, it drives on-demand production and flexible supply. Real time market data feedback from circulation terminals is an important decision-making basis for production enterprises. Through the supply chain collaboration platform, this information can be seamlessly and instantly transmitted to the design and manufacturing processes, driving enterprises to shift from a prediction based production model to a real-time order based production model, and developing customized and small order fast response models. This can effectively solve the problem of "what to produce", reduce ineffective and inefficient supply, accurately allocate production capacity to areas with strong market demand, and resolve structural overcapacity. On the other hand, it forces quality upgrades and value leaps. The distribution channels, especially large retailers and e-commerce platforms, form strong market constraints and value orientation for upstream production enterprises by establishing strict quality access standards, promoting high-quality certification, and conducting brand marketing activities. This prompts enterprises not only to be satisfied with "being able to produce", but also to pursue "quality", "brand", and "service". This can effectively force the entire supply system to break free from low-level repetition and "internal competition", upgrade towards high quality, high added value, and high brand value, and achieve a transformation from strong supply to excellent supply, creating and meeting higher-level demand with high-quality supply. At the same time, improving overall efficiency and response speed through supply chain collaboration. A dispersed and fragmented supply chain is an important reason for the disconnect between supply and demand, as well as inventory backlog. The modern circulation system objectively promotes deep collaboration in the supply chain, achieving real-time sharing and linkage of production plans, inventory information, and logistics status. This greatly enhances the resilience of the supply system and the overall response speed to market changes, enabling it to quickly respond to demand fluctuations and efficiently serve real and changing market demands with strong production capacity, transforming supply capacity advantages into market competitive advantages. The modern circulation system can effectively promote the release of economies of scale. Local protection and market segmentation are important reasons for causing "local surplus, shortage in other places" or "demand fragmentation". The infrastructure network and unified rules and standards of the modern circulation system can promote the free flow of goods across regions, enabling enterprises to arrange production for the national market and achieve economies of scale; Enable consumers to conveniently access high-quality products from all over the country, unleashing a huge amount of aggregated demand. This essentially provides a broader market for strong supply capacity and important support for resolving supply-demand contradictions. The shortcomings of the circulation system are exacerbated by strong supply and weak demand. A modern circulation system can improve the efficiency of the national economy, link production and consumption on a larger scale, effectively expand domestic demand, promote deepening division of labor, and promote wealth creation. If the circulation system in the economic cycle is not smooth and its functions are not prominent, it will not only fail to alleviate the supply-demand contradiction, but also exacerbate the "mismatch" and "obstruction", making the contradiction between strong supply and weak demand more prominent. Market segmentation can lead to 'demand fragmentation'. Local protection and hidden barriers hinder the free flow of goods across the country, preventing some advantageous production capacities from entering broader markets, and local consumers from easily obtaining higher quality and more cost-effective products from other regions. The market is divided into small pools, which not only suppresses the choice space and total scale of demand, but also limits the radiation range of supply, resulting in 'production capacity cannot be sold, demand cannot be bought'. The imbalance in the development of urban-rural circulation networks has led to the suppression of rural demand and the loss of agricultural product supply. The weak circulation facilities in rural areas result in high costs and limited choices for industrial products to be sent to rural areas, which suppresses the willingness of rural residents to upgrade their consumption. At the same time, the lack of smooth upstream channels and cold chain for agricultural products has resulted in difficulties in exporting high-quality agricultural products from villages and significant losses, making it difficult for farmers to increase production and income, which in turn weakens their consumption ability. The obstruction of urban-rural circulation makes it difficult to unleash the potential of the huge rural consumer market, and the high-quality supply in the agricultural sector cannot be effectively transformed into farmers' income and urban residents' welfare. The information chain blockage leads to blind production and unresponsive demand. In the traditional and lengthy circulation chain, information transmission lags behind and distorts, making it difficult for production enterprises to timely obtain information on changes in the terminal market. This can easily lead to investment and production decisions based on inertia or local information, resulting in capacity expansion in some industries that is disconnected from actual demand and exacerbating structural overcapacity. At the same time, the new demands and preferences of consumers are difficult to effectively transmit, leading to a lag in supply side innovation and the inability to provide products that are suitable for sale, exacerbating the contradiction of "demand but no effective supply". Cost and efficiency issues weaken the economic feasibility of supply-demand integration. The high logistics costs and poor final delivery directly push up the final selling price of goods, eroding consumer purchasing power and corporate profit margins. When the cost of circulation offsets most of the cost-effectiveness advantage, many potential supply-demand matches no longer hold in economics, directly suppressing the occurrence of transactions. At present, China's modern circulation system construction has achieved positive results, with a more sound commercial and logistics system, a continuous expansion of circulation scale, and steady growth in indicators such as total retail sales of consumer goods and total social logistics. To further resolve the contradiction between strong supply and weak demand, it is necessary to focus more on promoting supply-demand matching in the goals and measures of modern circulation system construction. To deepen the construction of a unified national market, break down barriers, and expand market space for strong supply. We will vigorously eliminate local protectionism and market segmentation, comprehensively clean up discriminatory and implicit barriers to entry, and promote the smooth flow of goods, especially high-quality industrial products and specialty agricultural products, throughout the country. This is essentially opening the "main valve" of the national market for the advantageous production capacity of various regions, digesting and optimizing supply through the aggregation of demand, and making "strong supply" truly a competitive advantage rather than excess pressure. Driven by digital intelligence, achieve precise matching and effectively connect supply and demand. Vigorously promote the digital and intelligent transformation of the entire circulation chain. Encourage platform enterprises and production enterprises to share data, develop demand forecasting, intelligent product selection, and personalized recommendations based on big data, and solve the information asymmetry problems of "not being able to buy" and "not being able to sell". Promote customized and flexible supply chain models to enable supply capacity to flexibly and accurately respond to and even lead market demand changes, reducing blind production and inventory backlog. Optimize supply response through supply chain collaboration and improve the efficiency of supply and demand matching. Support chain owners to create an open and collaborative supply chain platform, promoting real-time information sharing or business linkage between upstream and downstream enterprises in planning, production, inventory, and logistics. Enhance the agile response capability of the entire supply system to market demand, transform "strong supply" into "fast supply" and "quasi supply", and effectively capture and meet real-time and diversified market demands. Strengthen standards and brand leadership to upgrade supply and create new growth points for demand. Utilize the quality control and brand cultivation functions of large-scale distribution channels and platforms. By setting higher quality standards, promoting green certification, creating China-Chic New Product Zone and other ways, we can force and help manufacturers to improve quality and build brands. Stimulate and meet the demand for consumption upgrading with high-quality supply, open up new market space, and guide the "strong supply" to climb towards high value-added links. To fill the gaps in the circulation network and unleash potential demand, and explore new blue oceans of domestic demand. Key addition

Edit:Luoyu Responsible editor:Jiajia

Source:ECONOMIC DAILY

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