Experts and business leaders said China should ramp up efforts to make total factor productivity, which refers to how efficiently and intensely inputs are used in the production process; maintain a high growth rate; and seek new driving forces to bolster economic growth.

"The improvement of total factor productivity depends on whether new drivers of the Chinese economy are found and how to effectively release them," Liu Qiao, dean of the Guanghua School of Management at Peking University.

The biggest and most key problem of the Chinese economy lies in how to make total factor productivity maintain rapid growth as the high-speed growth phase is over, Liu said at a conference held by Tencent News and Guanghua School of Management, Peking University in Beijing.

Liu noted that the new economic drivers come from reindustrialization, new infrastructure and more thorough reform and opening-up.

"China's scale dividends are likely to be an important driver of improving the total factor productivity over the next five to 10 years," said Shen Minggao, chief economist at GF Securities, who noted more efforts are needed to drive the transformation and upgrading of the traditional manufacturing industry, enhance its efficiency, as well as improve total factor productivity, in a bid to maintain a relatively rapid GDP growth.

Shen noted that China's potential growth driver lies in the scale, underlining that China is one of the countries worldwide with the longest and most complete manufacturing industrial chain. "The next step is to embrace more large-scale dividends in a standardized way, surpassing the United States and Germany."

Tao Lin, vice-president of Tesla, said Tesla's gigafactory in Shanghai, which took less than 10 months to build, is a miracle that can only happen in China.

"This is the result of a high degree of coordination among every link of the chain. Tesla is not just contributing an auto plant in China, but also supporting smart manufacturing and providing more possibilities for industrial integration," Tao added.

She believed that electric vehicles are the premise of smart cars, which is the real development direction of new energy vehicles or transportation tools.