Deconstructing the 15th Five Year Plan

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China’s 15th Five Year Plan, spanning 2026-203 was approved by the National People’s Congress in its March 2026 session. The plan, a good 80,000 Chinese characters long, offered few major surprises. This is for two reasons: one there is a lot of continuity with the 14th, and even the 13th Plan, and two, the “guidance” that the central committee of the communist party provided last October was, as expected, duly incorporated.Still, the Plan is worth a thorough review—first and foremost for aspiring Chinese bureaucrats, but also for those who that want to understand where the Chinese economy is heading, which new technologies we can expect coming out of China, and whether China will finally manage to rebalance its economy and reduce its increasingly contested trade surpluses.The role of the PlanToday’s plan is a far cry from the original Soviet style 5-year plans first introduced in 1953. Gone are the days of the thousands of tons of steel, the millions head of cattle and bushels of grain. Instead, the plan can best be understood as a strategic guide to the Chinese party, government and people, and a communication tool for the party leadership to coordinate individual actions across the vast economy of 1.4 billion people. The transition from Soviet to Strategic plan took place in the 1990s, with the 9th Five Year Plan, after China had declared itself a “socialist market economy” at the 14th National Party Congress.The “Outline of the 15th Five Year Plan (2026-2030) for National Economic and Social Development of the People’s Republic of China”[1] as it is formally called is a…