China’s Communist Party announced a sweeping new five-year economic plan that underscores its determination to become more technologically self-sufficient — a move that all but ensures continued friction with the United States.
The plan, unveiled Thursday, ties China’s economic future to state-led innovation and central planning, deepening its long-running rivalry with Washington.
In an outline of the nation’s 15th five-year plan, party leaders linked a series of mounting domestic and international challenges to their push for greater control over the economy through heavy investment in advanced manufacturing, artificial intelligence, and other strategic industries.
The blueprint, which will guide China through the end of the decade, envisions a future where Beijing relies less on Western technologies and more on its own industrial might.
“The balance the leadership is trying to strike between market forces and government intervention is still shifting toward the latter,” said Julian Evans-Pritchard of Capital Economics. His assessment reflects a growing view among analysts that President Xi Jinping’s government is tightening its grip on economic life, using industrial policy to assert global dominance rather than to liberalize markets.
The document’s release followed a four-day meeting of hundreds of senior Communist Party officials in Beijing, presided over by Xi himself. Nearly one-sixth of those eligible to attend were absent, many of them swept up in Xi’s ongoing anticorruption campaigns — purges that have consolidated his personal control over the party and the economy alike.
Beijing’s economic plans are a defining feature of its authoritarian system, but they have also drawn wary attention from capitalist nations.
As China’s rapid rise has showcased the power of central planning to direct resources and shape industries, some in the West have begun to view industrial policy with renewed interest — even as they criticize the lack of transparency and fairness that accompanies it.
The new blueprint highlights a continued effort to expand consumption and reduce reliance on exports — goals long urged by Western economists — but the broader thrust remains toward self-reliance and state dominance.
The plan renews emphasis on Xi’s concept of “new productive forces,” or cutting-edge manufacturing, a phrase that has become central to his economic doctrine.
China’s aggressive pursuit of independence in sectors such as semiconductors and artificial intelligence was already evident in the previous five-year plan, which ends in 2025.
Those efforts, fueled by massive subsidies and state investment, have allowed China to gain global prominence in electric vehicles and renewable energy. But they have also led to overproduction, collapsing prices, and trade frictions abroad as cheap Chinese goods flood foreign markets.
“The past decade and a half have shown that there is power in these plans,” said Katja Drinhausen of the Mercator Institute for China Studies. “Especially if they are coupled with investment, resources and incentives—and that this formula has paid off.”
The new plan arrives as China remains locked in an economic and strategic standoff with the United States. The two nations continue to battle over artificial intelligence, rare earth minerals, and global supply chains — with each side seeking to reduce dependence on the other.
President Trump has responded with tariffs and restrictions aimed at protecting U.S. industries, while Beijing has retaliated with export controls and expanded state investment.
Trump and Xi are expected to meet next week at a summit in South Korea in an attempt to cool trade tensions. Yet Beijing’s latest plan offers little sign of compromise.
It reflects a China convinced that the road to power runs through technological supremacy — even if it deepens the divide with the United States and the rest of the free-market world.
[READ MORE: Trump Pauses Planned Putin Meeting, Says New Ukraine Strategy Coming Soon]
