How a plan
is made
The plan is not one document but a cascade. The Party sets direction, the legislature makes it law, and then roughly 100–200 sectoral and provincial plans translate it into budgets and permits over the following eighteen months. Understanding the cascade is what separates reading the plan from reading the news about the plan.
A second distinction matters more than any headline: some targets are binding and some are not. Officials are evaluated on the first kind and merely encouraged on the second — which is why the environmental numbers usually get hit and the consumption numbers usually do not.
Binding targets
Government is directly accountable. Mostly environmental, land-use, and social-service metrics — things the state controls through its own budget, permits, and quotas. Missing one damages a career. Energy intensity, farmland area, forest cover, hospital beds per capita.
Anticipatory targets
Expectations, not commitments — the state signals a direction and the market is supposed to deliver. GDP growth, R&D spending, disposable income, urbanisation. Missing one is attributed to conditions. Since the 14th plan, headline growth is deliberately vague: "within a reasonable range."
All fifteen
plans
Read straight through, the sequence is a record of what the leadership was afraid of at the time: Soviet dependency, then American bombers, then rural poverty, then inflation, then unemployment, then pollution, and now export controls. Open any plan for its aims, its signature projects, what actually happened, and a verdict.
Policy
threads
Individual plans are easy to read in isolation and misleading that way. Nine concerns recur across all of them, and the interesting information is in how each concern rises, disappears, and returns in different language. Food security in 1962 and food security in 2026 are the same worry with different instruments.
Each cell shows how central that thread was to that plan, and what specifically it looked like. Select a cell to read it. Darker means more central.
Nine threads across sixteen periods
The grid is an editorial reading, not an official metric — emphasis is judged from each plan's own text, the projects funded under it, and what the leadership was arguing about at the time. Start anywhere; the diagonal from bottom-left to top-right is the story of the reform era.
The 15th plan
2026–2030
Approved by the National People's Congress on 12 March 2026, after the Party's Fourth Plenum signed off on recommendations in October 2025. It is the middle of three consecutive plans meant to deliver "basically achieving socialist modernisation" by 2035, which makes it the cycle where the arithmetic either works or stops working.
The diagnosis it offers of China's own economy is "strong supply, weak demand." The remedy it prescribes is, for the most part, more supply — better supply, in higher-value sectors, but supply. That tension is the plan's central and most criticised feature.
Target
table
The 15th plan's quantified targets, against where China actually finished the 14th. The direction column shows whether the new target is more demanding than the outcome it inherits. Two entries are worth pausing on: the carbon-intensity target has been loosened from 18% to 17%, and headline GDP growth still has no five-year number attached.
Carbon and energy figures are cumulative over the five-year period. Grain capacity in trillion jin; 1 trillion jin ≈ 500 million tonnes.
What's
contested
Analysts disagree less about what the plan says than about whether it can work, and about whether the plan does anything at all. Both arguments have serious people on both sides.
2031 and
beyond
Five-year plans now sit inside longer frames. The 14th plan came bundled with "long-range objectives through 2035," which is the horizon that actually disciplines the current cycle. The 16th plan, covering 2031–2035, will be the one that has to close whatever gap the 15th leaves.