Executive Summary:
- The ordering of chapters in the outline of the 15th Five-Year Plan provides clues to Beijing’s shifting priorities.
- For the first time in the Xi era, the chapter on the country’s industrial system and the real economy appears above the one on innovation-driven development. This could indicate that the leadership sees industrial strength as a more immediate concern than technological progress, or that it is seeking to rebalance after a decade of prioritizing technological progress.
- The chapter on opening up appears much earlier than in previous plans’ outlines. This might signal an awareness that the country’s export-driven model is predicated on guaranteed access to external markets. It could also reflect assessments of an increasingly challenging international environment.
- Across the last four five-year plans, both the agricultural sector and environmental priorities have slipped significantly down the order of the outline’s chapters. This is in part a story of structural economic transformation, but may also reflect growing divergence between rhetoric that valorizes the Party’s traditional rural base and policies that have failed this large segment of the population.
Five-Year Plans are among the most important documents that the Chinese government produces. They emerge from a complex planning process that canvases stakeholders across the country and at all levels of society and create an agenda for the entire national system. The government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) engages in this triumph of bureaucracy twice a decade. The result of the latest effort was delivered to the public on March 13, when Xinhua published the full text of the “outline” (纲要) of the 15th Five-Year Plan (Xinhua, March 13).
The planning process for the latest plan began more than two years ago. In the months since, its drafting committee has conducted more than 40 research trips, held over 50 symposiums, directed high-level research institutions to produce nearly 200 reports, and compiled nearly 70,000 high-quality suggestions. In late 2025, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Central Committee drew up a series of “recommendations” (建议), which formed the basis for the draft; and in early 2026, the State Council gathered input over a further series of symposiums. The outline was finally approved following reviews at the Two Sessions (两会) in March by both the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (SCIO, March 7).
The 15th Five-Year Plan comprises 18 chapters, 62 sections, and 171 subsections. The bulk of the content appears in chapters 2–17, which is bookended by a general overview that lays out an assessment of the development environment and sets forth guiding principles at the top, and a guarantee of the plan’s implementation at the end, which underscores the basic requirements of loyalty to the Party Central Committee in carrying out the plan’s directives.
The structure and ordering of the plan’s chapters is important. In general, the most important chapters related to the country’s economic development appear near the top. The ordering of the rest of the chapters does not fully follow this logic (it is not the case that the PRC views the last chapter in the outline as the least important), but a chapter’s relative position—especially when compared to previous plans—can be a useful indicator of how official perceptions of that area of development has changed over time. For instance, the 12th Five-Year Plan outline addressed “social management” (社会管理) in its ninth chapter (out of 16), but in the following plan social management (rebranded as “social governance” (社会治理)) dropped down to chapter 17 (out of 20). This likely reflected the increased securitization of this domain under General Secretary Xi Jinping: the chapter was moved from those covering human capital development to appearing alongside those focused on national defense and security, where it has remained ever since (NDRC, September 2011, March 2016, March 2021). [1]
Changes to the ordering of the outline’s chapters can therefore provide an indication of a shift in the Party’s understanding of which governance domains are most critical and how different domains interrelate. While a bird’s-eye view of changes in the document’s structure cannot be correlated mechanically with a specific evolution in the Party-state’s thinking on a particular area, highlighting changes, both from one plan to the next and across a larger sample set of recent plans, can provide insights that offer pointers for further analysis.
New Emphasis on Industrial System and Opening Up
One significant change appears near the very top of the latest outline. For the first time, the chapter on the country’s industrial system and the real economy appears in pole position, above the chapter on innovation-driven development. The phrase “innovation-driven development” does not appear at all in the latest outline, despite featuring in chapter titles in the previous two. The relevant chapter title in the latest outline instead refers to “accelerating high-level scientific and technological self-reliance and self-strengthening to lead the development of new quality productive forces” (加快高水平科技自立自强 引领发展新质生产力).
The elevation of industry and the real economy over innovation and “new quality productive forces” is significant, though the reason for the switch has not been explained. One possible reading is that while the Party is pinning its ambitions on seizing the “commanding heights” (制高点) in emerging technologies in the future, sustaining the country’s economic model in the present will require a much stronger focus on mitigating structural weaknesses and doubling down on its formidable industrial strength. An alternative interpretation is that having prioritized innovation-driven development above the real economy for the last decade, the Party-state believes the time has come to readjust.
Comments from a press conference hosted by the State Council Information Office (SCIO) on March 7 speak to this, laying out a phased plan for the rollout of emerging technologies that will take place over a number of years, rather than all coming to fruition in the near term. Officials described a “development sequence” (发展序列) for emerging industries that starts in the short-term with a focus on next-generation information technology and new energy. This will be followed in the medium term by a focus on developing emerging “pillar industries” (新兴支柱产业) such as integrated circuits, biomedicine, and aerospace, and in the long term by “future industries” (未来产业) such as quantum technology, brain-computer interfaces, and embodied intelligence (SCIO, March 7).
The second substantive chapter in the latest outline, on “new quality productive forces,” includes “self-reliance and self-strengthening” in a chapter header for the first time since. The decision to highlight this phrase underscores the urgency with which the Party is pursuing the indigenization of critical and strategic technologies. But this drive is in tension with one of the most notable shifts in the latest outline.
Chapter seven is titled “expand high-level opening-up and create a new landscape of win-win cooperation” (扩大高水平对外开放 开创合作共赢新局面). The existence of a chapter on “opening up” in itself is not new. Similar ones appear in all three of the previous plans surveyed here. What is distinct is the chapter’s positioning. In the outlines of the 12th, 13th, and 14th plans, the chapters on opening up appeared either four or five places lower in the order. Such a dramatic change in the order in the latest outline is therefore significant.
Ranking opening up among the core chapters on economic development probably signals a recognition that the Party-state’s economic model is increasingly dependent on external markets. As the chapter’s subsections make clear, opening up is less about loosening restrictions for external investors to participate in the PRC’s domestic market than about maintaining access to foreign markets for the enormous volume of Chinese manufacturing and industrial products. These subsections include focusing on what the Party calls “independent” (自主) opening up (that is, on its own terms), continued construction of the One Belt One Road (OBOR) initiative, and promoting a “community of common destiny for mankind” (人类命运共同体). This latter section signals in part the need to acquire diplomatic buy-in from partner countries to ensure that the PRC maintains favorable economic relationships.
The Party’s changing assessment of the country’s external environment is another possible reason for the PRC’s shift in its approach to opening up, as illustrated in the outline. As Dong Yu (董煜), an academic at Tsinghua University who has participated in the formulation of multiple five-year plans, notes, geopolitical shifts constituted the “biggest change” (最大的变化) during the planning process for the 15th Five-Year Plan. Dong specifically references “a marked increase in challenges and unfavorable factors” (挑战和不利因素明显增多), and predicts that “great power competition and rivalry may further intensify” (大国竞争、大国博弈可能会进一步加剧) (China Reform News, February 24). This is supported by other experts, such as a leading economist at the Bank of China, who argued in response to the Central Committee’s recommendations for paying “greater attention to coordinating both domestic and international situations, and more consciously plan and promote national development within a global context” (更加注重统筹国内国际两个大局，更加自觉地把国家发展置于全球格局中谋划推进) (Sohu, November 3, 2025). It is also made clear in the opening chapter of the outline itself, which describes the international situation as “intricate and complicated” (错综复杂).
Long-Term Decline in Chapters on Agriculture, the Environment
Comparing the structure of five-year plan outlines since 2011, two general trends stand out. One is the steady descent of the chapter on agriculture, which has dropped from being the very first substantive chapter in 12th Five-Year Plan down to eighth in the latest—the lowest to date. A substantial part of this story is the relative decline of the agricultural sector within the makeup of the national economy. As the economist Yasheng Huang has recently pointed out, however, it is also a reflection—despite official protestations—of the Party erring in its original mission. In his article “How China Forgot Karl Marx,” Huang notes that “the relative position of Chinese … farm workers today is worse than it was before China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001” (Foreign Affairs, March 23).
The agricultural sector’s descent down the list of economic priority areas is matched only by the apparent decline in importance of environmental concerns. While chapter six of the 12th Five-Year Plan outline focuses on “green development” (绿色发展), “green transformation” (绿色转型) is only covered in chapter 13 of the latest plan—the last chapter before those focusing on national security-related issues. Whether this is due to a perception that the PRC has made sufficient progress in this area to be able to deprioritize it, or whether the leadership has assessed that environmental risks do not constitute as big a risk to regime stability as previously thought, is unclear.
Conclusion
Analyzing the outline of the 15th Five-Year Plan by comparing the text’s structural logic with that of previous plans’ outlines does not provide sufficient explanatory power to conclusively assess shifts in the Party-state’s overall strategy or approach to development. It nevertheless offers an alternative set of data points to inform such assessments.
The relative increase in emphasis on industrial strength and opening up, and the long-term deemphasizing of the agricultural sector and environmental priorities across the last four outlines broadly match up with real-world developments over the last 15 or so years. This indicates that emphases that exist in the latest plan can help to inform expectations for the PRC’s development over the coming five years.
Notes
[1] For more on the Party’s approach to social management/social governance, and its links to the PRC’s national defense mobilization system, see Samantha Hoffman, Mobilizing the State (Washington, D.C.: The Jamestown Foundation), 2026 (forthcoming).