Growing pains: A group of tourists are seen visiting a shopping street in Beijing. The next five years will present a landscape where strategic opportunities sit alongside risks and uncertainties. — AFP
BEIJING: With a high-level meeting wrapped up in Beijing last week, China set out a clear roadmap for how it intends to steer the economy as the next five-year plan period is set to begin.
The annual Central Economic Work Conference, chaired by President Xi Jinping, laid out the country’s economic work priorities for the coming year.
This included implementing more proactive and impactful macroeconomic policies, continuously expanding domestic demand and optimising supply, fostering new quality productive forces according to local conditions, and developing a unified national market – measures aimed at ensuring a solid start to the 15th Five-Year Plan period (2026 to 2030).
As the current five-year cycle approaches a strong finish, China is looking to carry that strength into the next one, laying even stronger foundations for its ambition of basically achieving socialist modernisation by 2035, a goal marked in part by lifting per capita gross domestic product to be on par with that of a mid-level developed country.
While acknowledging risks and challenges ahead, Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, said the fundamentals supporting China’s long-term growth remain unchanged and called for bolstering confidence, harnessing advantages and meeting challenges head-on to consolidate and build on the steady economic momentum.
Despite mounting pressures from escalating global trade tensions and domestic cyclical and structural headwinds, China’s economy has held firm this year.
A set of data illustrates the economic vitality.
Every day, roughly 24,000 new businesses spring up nationwide and more than 120 billion yuan (around US$17bil) in goods cross the country’s borders.
Each second, over 1.43 million gigabytes of data stream through the cloud, while some 6,000 parcels enter logistics networks.
Recently, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) lifted its 2025 China growth forecast to 5%, up from 4.8% in October – a move echoed by the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, all raising their projections in quick succession.
“China’s economy has shown notable resilience despite facing multiple shocks in recent years,” said Sonali Jain-Chandra, who led an IMF team that visited Beijing and Shanghai early this month.
During an inspection in Henan in May, Xi called for remaining confident and unswervingly managing the country’s own affairs well amid a complex external environment, and confronting uncertainties with the certainty brought by high-quality development.
Over the year, Xi travelled across China’s economic map – from the northeastern heavy-industry heartland to the innovation centres of the eastern coast – and presided over a string of major meetings that discussed topics from boosting consumption to private sector development.
These trips and meetings were aimed at reviewing on-the-ground conditions and refining policies for stable and sustainable development.
On factory floors from Liaoning’s steel mill to Henan’s bearing plant, Xi stressed that the real economy remains the backbone of national strength, calling for advancing manufacturing along high-end, intelligent and green pathways.
Talking with entrepreneurs at a symposium, Xi assured them that supportive policies would remain unchanged and that private businesses have broad prospects ahead, shoring up confidence in the private sector.
This year, the country enacted a law to promote the private economy, introduced targeted measures to spur private investment, and sped up the clearing of overdue payments to companies.
In particular, innovation has emerged as a central focus for Xi.
At a fast-growing large-model incubator in Shanghai, Xi was briefed by a number of start-ups, including Infinigence AI, then less than two years old, which has rapidly scaled its cloud capacity to more than 25,000 petaflops across 53 data centres in 26 cities.
Xia Lixue, chief executive officer of Infinigence AI, said the company’s breakthroughs were made possible largely thanks to strong national support for artificial intelligence (AI) development.
Accelerating innovation in digital and intelligent technologies such as AI has been written into the CPC Central Committee’s recommendations for formulating the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026 to 2030) adopted at a key party plenum in October.
China must deliver substantial progress and new breakthroughs in boosting scientific and technological innovation, fostering new drivers of growth, and promoting economic structural improvement and upgrading, Xi added.
The next five years will present a landscape where strategic opportunities sit alongside risks and uncertainties.
But China remains steady-handed: the tougher the challenges, the more it will lean on reform and opening-up to unlock potential and cultivate new drivers of growth.
Following the key party plenum in October, Xi inspected Hainan and Guangdong provinces last month. His selection was highly symbolic.
Hainan is preparing for the launch of island-wide special customs operations for the Hainan Free Trade Port (FTP), representing China’s latest landmark move of opening up.
Guangdong, the cradle of many of the country’s early reform initiatives, is aiming to carry its pioneering role forward.
During the trip, Xi highlighted the significance of the Hainan FTP in expanding high-standard opening up and advancing an open world economy. — Xinhua
