The external environment for China’s economic development is much more complex than five years ago, which explains – and translates into -- all the judgments behind the decisions made at the 4th plenary session as well as the policy directions laid out in the Recommendations for the country’s 15th Five-Year Plan (FYP), covering 2026 to 2030.
First and foremost, the session defined the last five years (covered by the 14th FYP) as an extraordinary period during which China successfully pursued its development against the background of a complicated international landscape as well as the challenging domestic tasks of advancing reform, promoting development, and ensuring stability.
Building on that, the session sees the 15th FYP period as a critical time to consolidate past successes and use them to break new ground for achieving ‘socialist modernization’. The strategic significance of the next five years lies in the objective of seizing the strategic initiative amid intense international competition and securing major breakthroughs in strategic tasks of overall importance to Chinese modernization. The next five years are therefore a “critical stage” to decide if China will realize its overarching goal of reaching the status of a mid-level developed country in terms of per capita GDP and achieving socialist modernization by 2035.
Echoing the geo-economic and geo-technological tug of war between China and the U.S., the session concluded with a much more cautious assessment as far as the external environment for China’s economic development during the 15th FYP period is concerned: a period in which “strategic opportunities exist alongside risks and challenges and uncertainties and unforeseen factors are rising”. Therefore, all the Party members have been called upon for their “courage for acid tests from high winds, choppy waters, and even dangerous storms”.