Beijings New Five-Year Plan: More of the Same

A delegate attends a plenary session of China’s rubber-stamp National People’s Congress at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on March 9, 2026. Vincent Thian/Pool/AFP via Getty ImagesCommentaryFor China’s Communist Party, each new five-year plan is supposed to revise the direction of the economy. The recently announced version—the 15th of its kind—claims to have done that. Of course, like all past plans, it is mostly aspirational, certainly not operational. It states where Beijing wants to take the economy, not how it intends to get it there.