The Two Sessions, China’s annual legislative meeting, ended on Thursday with a flurry of votes on new laws, including one on environmental protection and another on promoting ethnic unity. The outcome of the votes is never in doubt and legislators’ contributions are seldom controversial, but one proposal generated a lively debate.
This was a pledge in the annual government work report to increase the minimum basic pension by RMB20 (€2.53) to RMB163 (€20.60) a month. If that sounds like a meagre sum in Ireland, it is derisory in China too and a number of delegates said that it did not really constitute a pension at all.
Some suggested a minimum of RMB500 a month (€63.18) that should rise to RMB1000 (€126.35) by 2030. Last year, the average monthly pension was just RMB287 (€36.26) and it was even lower for rural residents.
The work report calls for “investing in people” to be put at the heart of policy, both to improve livelihoods and to boost consumption, but Beijing prefers to do that through big projects rather than by putting money directly into people’s pockets.
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The 15th Five-Year Plan, which the National People’s Congress approved on Thursday, also talks about improving living standards through investing in people, but most of its focus is on investing in technology, particularly in “future industries”.
The plan identifies these industries, which include artificial intelligence, quantum computing, biomanufacturing, brain-computer interfaces, embodied intelligence and 6G technology, as core drivers of national development between now and 2030. China can use the scale of its market and industrial base, state co-ordination and huge investment in research and development to accelerate progress in the industries it prioritises.
Inspired by the Soviet Union under Stalin, China’s first five-year plan in 1953 sought to industrialise the country rapidly while collectivising farming to increase agricultural production. Mao Zedong’s ambition to transform China into a modern industrial power was about asserting national sovereignty as well as economic development.
“Only with industrialisation of the state may we guarantee our economic independence and non-reliance on imperialism,” the People’s Daily wrote at the time.
This week, the same paper described the five-year plan as a metronome of China’s development that translates long-term strategic goals into phased, practical steps. It generates a cascading architecture of annual plans, sector-specific plans and regional plans, each with its own targets.
“In China today, the market plays a decisive role in resource allocation. But this ‘invisible hand’ is sometimes less competent in areas like co-ordinating decade-spanning investments in computing infrastructure, clean energy or the semiconductor sector that could shape tomorrow’s economy,” the People’s Daily wrote.
“That is where the five-year plans step in, as they are designed to pool resources for major tasks, grasp strategic frontiers with foresight and guarantee the unbroken continuity of the development agenda. These blueprints work as a navigator for China to pursue future development and for investors to precisely explore business opportunities.”
For years, American policymakers have fretted about what they saw as China’s ambition to catch up with the United States on technology, particularly in areas like advanced semiconductors. Washington’s ban on the export of some advanced technologies, echoed by the European Union later, was designed to halt China’s progress.
The five-year plan suggests that, instead of trying to catch up with the US, China is hoping to take the lead in some technologies. With the world’s largest cohort of graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem), a huge digital consumer market, China is already ahead in some areas such as 5G, quantum communication and drones.
“China’s quest for tech sovereignty stretches beyond today’s chokehold, as it is no mere game of catch-up. China is setting the pace in terms of AI’s disruptive potential, and has planted flags across future-facing, tech-rich sectors. This is the forward-looking calculus of the country’s policymakers: even as the tech revolution’s fine print remains unwritten, its weight in the production mix is projected to snowball,” the state-run Xinhua news agency wrote in a commentary this week.
“With tech self-reliance having evolved from a policy goal into a national imperative, the narrative of China’s tech ascent is entering a new chapter. Understanding this drive is key to decoding the country’s future trajectory.”
