The recently concluded Fourth Plenary Session of the Communist Party of China approved the draft proposal for the “15th Five-Year Plan”, essentially setting the overall direction for the plan. After going through the necessary procedures, the new Five-Year Plan will be reviewed at the National People’s Congress in March next year and then put into implementation. The content revealed at this meeting, in essence, has become the focus of widespread attention.

The recently concluded Fourth Plenary Session of the Communist Party of China approved the draft proposal for the 15th Five-Year Plan, setting the strategic direction for China’s next stage of development. After formal review and approval at the National People’s Congress in March, the plan will enter implementation. The session’s communiqué offers an early glimpse into the guiding principles and priorities that will shape China’s policy agenda in the years ahead.

As the 15th Five-Year Plan serves as a bridge toward achieving the second centenary goal by 2035, it carries great importance. From the communiqué of the meeting, researchers at ANBOUND observed several notable features and changes. While the goal of realizing the second centenary remains unchanged and requires consistent effort, the development approach has shifted from the previous focus on “quantitative change” to an emphasis on achieving “qualitative change”.

In assessing the situation, the 15th Five-Year Plan takes a more cautious view of the next five years. Its positioning emphasizes persistence and long-term development, which suggests that during the period, less attention will be given to short-term issues, with a stronger focus on continuity and addressing long-term challenges.

The plan also takes a more sober view of the external environment. The 14th Five-Year Plan had characterized the situation as “a world undergoing changes unseen in a century”, where opportunities and risks coexist. It stated that China remains in an important period of strategic opportunity, though both opportunities and challenges are evolving. In contrast, the Fourth Plenary Session’s assessment for the 15th Five-Year Plan is more cautious, recognizing that the environment is increasingly complex. The communiqué noted that during this period, China faces profound and complex changes, with rising uncertainty and unpredictable factors.

As it stands, this recent Five-Year Plan does not specify concrete economic growth targets. However, given the emphasis on continuity and complexity, it can be expected that annual growth rates during the next five years will be lower than during the 14th Five-Year Plan. Nonetheless, the goal of achieving the second centenary objective by 2035 remains in place. This implies that average annual growth will still need to stay above 4.5%, though without rigid year-by-year targets, making sustainability especially crucial. As ANBOUND researchers noted, annual growth rates will have more flexibility and may vary with circumstances, but the overall aggregate goal remains unchanged.

From the announced goals and tasks of the 15th Five-Year Plan, compared to those of its predecessor, several new shifts can be seen. The 14th Five-Year Plan set the following objectives: achieving new progress in economic development; making new advances in reform and opening-up; improving social civility; making new strides in ecological civilization; raising living standards; and enhancing governance effectiveness. The communiqué for the 15th Five-Year Plan lists the following goals: achieving notable progress in high-quality development; significantly enhancing scientific and technological self-reliance and strength; achieving new breakthroughs in deepening comprehensive reform; markedly improving social civility; continuously improving people’s quality of life; and strengthening national security safeguards.

From the meeting content, it is clear that while the 2035 goal of basically realizing modernization remains unchanged, the targets and tasks for the 15th Five-Year Plan differ from the previous plan. As ANBOUND researchers anticipated, “high-quality development”, which has replaced the broader concept of “economic development” of the prior plan, is now the central task. This aligns with the overarching goal of achieving socialist modernization by 2035. At the same time, science and technology have become more prominent and critical. On one hand, high-quality development driven by technological innovation will be at the heart of the plan, serving as the main driver for China’s economic and social development over the next five years. On the other hand, the plan’s emphasis on “technological self-reliance and self-strengthening” reflects a heavier and higher-level requirement than the 14th Five-Year Plan, which focused on achieving breakthroughs in key technologies. This underscores that technological autonomy has become a new requirement under intensifying geopolitical risks and the escalating China–U.S. tech competition.

Tellingly, the 15th Five-Year Plan updates the 14th Five-Year Plan’s goal of “making new progress in reform and opening-up” to “achieving new breakthroughs in deepening comprehensive reform”, reflecting a more inward-focused orientation. Although comprehensive reform will likely include measures to expand openness, the diminished emphasis on “opening-up” implicitly reflects the impact of global deglobalization trends, closely related to the policy emphasis on “domestic circulation”. Given that the Third Plenary Session already outlined a broad reform agenda, the comprehensive reforms during the 15th Five-Year Plan will likely proceed within that framework.

Other goals, such as “enhancing social civility” and “improving living standards”, continue themes from the 14th Five-Year Plan, reflecting ongoing commitments to sustainable development and common prosperity. The new goal of “strengthening national security safeguards” responds to worsening global security conditions.

As ANBOUND has previously emphasized, the meeting again indicated the importance and role of the market economy. The communiqué proposed strengthening the domestic market and accelerating the formation of a new development pattern. It called for adhering to the strategic principle of expanding domestic demand, closely combining improving people’s livelihoods with promoting consumption, and integrating investment in both physical and human capital. The plan highlights leading new demand with new supply and creating new demand through new supply, promoting virtuous interaction between consumption and investment, and enhancing the internal dynamism and reliability of domestic circulation. It also stressed the need to boost consumption, expand effective investment, and remove barriers to building a unified national market.

From this perspective, a healthy interaction between consumption and investment is essential to expanding domestic demand; emphasizing one over the other is not the right approach. On the supply side, the industrial policies of the 15th Five-Year Plan focus on "building a modern industrial system and strengthening the foundation of the real economy". Together with measures to regulate markets, energize key players, and boost demand, these policies form an institutional response to "disordered industrial competition". At the same time, there is an emphasis on stabilizing and expanding the industrial system and real economy alongside advances in science and technology, signaling a shift from an "innovation-driven" model to one that integrates innovation with industrial development. This represents a fundamental structural reform aimed at balancing supply and demand.

Final analysis conclusion:

Overall, as ANBOUND anticipated, China’s 15th Five-Year Plan framework revealed by the Fourth Plenary Session places “high-quality development” at its core, continuing the transition from “quantitative” to “qualitative” growth established during the 14th Five-Year Plan. Within this, technology, especially autonomous innovation, plays a more central role. At the same time, the plan places greater emphasis on sustainability, flexibility, and long-term development over the next five years.