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Over the past few months, China watchers everywhere have been speculating on this year’s ‘Five Year Plan’ (China’s 14th since the start of communist rule). On Friday, the plans — 192 chapters’ worth of information and a total of 74,000 Chinese characters — were rubber stamped by the National People’s Congress and put out into the world. Now, officials, companies, and universities both in China and abroad will be pouring over the pages to get an understanding on China’s future plans and directions.

The Five Year Plan is a bit like a party manifesto in democratic countries where there are many parties up for election. In China, though, the Plan is guaranteed to pass because there is no opposition. They’re not only published for the benefit of the government; they’re also the targets that all officials and businesses inside China should also work towards. The Communist Party’s plans talk about the economy, the environment, foreign policy, security, and where it wants Chinese society to head between now and 2026. 

Western news outlets and observers were particularly interested in what the Communist Party’s environmental plans were, considering China is trying to actively tackle its image as the world’s biggest polluter. The Party wants to cut “emissions intensity” (the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) produced per unit of GDP — how much the Chinese economy makes in a year) by 18% by 2025. They also want non-fossil fuels to make up a fifth of Chinese energy demands. Chinese officials think that the environmental protection sector is going to grow up to a value of 1trn Chinese yuan (£110bn) — going green is becoming big business in China. 

But there are fears that’s nowhere near enough. There were few details on how China hopes to reach net zero in 2060 or to make sure that the country’s CO2 output peaks before 2030. Whereas it is expected that China wants to drop the share of coal in Chinese energy by 6% by 2025, this is only from 58% to 52%. With the Chinese economy still growing, pegging carbon dioxide emissions to how much the economy grows gives scope for emissions to increase up to more than 1% a year. There were even talks inside the Chinese electricity boards in 2019 that there might need to be more coal to meet higher demand, and 37 gigawatts of coal power supply were green-lit in 2020. 

There is some hope, though. Chinese President Xi Jinping’s staked a lot of his international reputation and political power on making China a global leader in tackling climate change. We’ve yet to hear their plans for cutting their emissions contributions for the worldwide Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow this year. Meanwhile, the National Energy Administration is drawing up its response to the Five Year Plan. Bernice Lee of British international politics think tank Chatham House told The Guardian, “the announcement…is just the start of a marathon, not a sprint.”

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Away from the environment, another big Chinese priority is making the country less dependent on the rest of the world. Right now, China’s got what’s called an ‘export-driven economy’, where the economy gets bigger more from selling to other countries than to its own people. President Xi wants to change that so that people and businesses inside China provide more growth for its economy. He’s also said, in coded language, that he wants to make sure Chinese businesses are more in line with Party thinking; this is a big change from the reforming president Deng Xiaoping of the 1980s, whose more liberal ideas brought millions of Chinese people out of poverty.

This makes sense. As China has become more powerful in the world, other countries have become warier of cooperating with them as openly as they used to. Countries like Australia, the UK, and the US have all come to blows with China over its influence in Western institutions, the erosion of democratic freedom in Hong Kong, the way it’s conducted trade, and much more besides. The Chinese government are also aware that other countries’ populations increasingly want businesses and governments to look after their country first, particularly the United States. Making sure that China’s own people can provide its prosperity instead of relying on the world to buy its products is a vital part of China’s strategy. 

In response, China wants to support its powerful technology sector by pledging billions to support researching future tech. It already has advantages against the rest of the world on 5G, artificial intelligence and self-driving taxis, but it knows that the US is trying to fight against this. By becoming more ‘self-sufficient’ and relying less on the rest of the world to buy its products, it should be able to cope better with other rich countries refusing to work with China. It also wants to be able to rely on itself in terms of food, energy and financial security, knowing that other countries are becoming more hostile to Chinese power. 

Finally, another big policy is building up cities away from the coast, where megacities like Shanghai and Shenzhen (near Hong Kong) attract lots of people away from smaller places. Smaller city have been easier to move to for a long time, but they don’t have very much to offer. People are drawn to the lights and bigger opportunities, even though it’s harder to move there. 

President Xi wants to create ‘clean, compact, and connected’ (CCC) cities away from the coast, with better infrastructure, health and education services, and using technology for better energy efficiency. This, in theory, would all increase how attractive smaller cities can be for people considering moving out of the countryside to find a better standard of living. This new strategy also puts less strain on big cities to cope with constant urban migration.

Got five minutes? 

Five Year Plans may seem like some relic from the Cold War, but they offer a lot of valuable insight for governments, businesses, and academics abroad. In a country where the media and freedom of speech is tightly controlled, it’s at these moments where people can get a good idea of what the country’s leaders think about where China is heading, and what it wants to do about that. The Chinese government knows this, too. For the 13th Five Year Plan in 2015, state media released a very jaunty song in English about it, highlighting how important ‘consultation’ was and how China wasn’t completely ruled just by the powers that be. 

Initially, they used to be very strictly adhered to under Chairman Mao Zedong, communist China’s first leader. With local authorities responsible for carrying out the plan in an autocratic country, data is sometimes touched up a little to paint a rosier picture. This had fatal consequences in the 1950s when data that had been cosmetically altered had hidden that the country was heading for famine. Even though the plans became more relaxed under President Deng in the Eighties, local authorities, big businesses, and banks all still have to make sure their strategies are altered to make the government’s plans. 

In many ways, the 14th Five Year Plan is the mark of a country that knows it’s on the way up and will do anything to keep it that way. China’s leadership knows the world is much more suspicious of its motivations than in 2015 — for example, at that time, then-British prime minister David Cameron had been lauding a ‘golden age’ in Britain-China relations. The leadership knows if the world doesn’t want to do as much business with China anymore, it has to find other ways of making money if it wants to become the next superpower.

This is about stopping its one of its greatest strengths — its manufacturing power — from being wasted on a world turning inwards and against China. A crucial part of this is making sure that millions of people outside of the big cities can also access the wealth and secure lifestyle that will grow China’s economy at home, replacing any lost demand abroad.

But, with the rest of the world in mind, the direction of China’s government isn’t that much different from what leaders all over the world are talking about. Politics today, for better or worse, is much more about taking (back) control of what can be in your control, becoming suspicious of ulterior motives and others’ grand strategies, and ensuring that you’ve got enough power in the tank to weather the storms of climate change, COVID-19, and increasing international tensions. With China seeking to shore up more of its power inside its own borders so it can project it around the world, there’s nothing here that’s bucking that worldwide trend.