Based on current trends, policy signals, and structural developments, China’s 15th Five-Year Plan (2026–2030) is widely expected to mark a paradigm upgrade, building on the capacity-building focus of the 13th Five-Year Plan and the system-strengthening agenda of the 14th. More than a continuation, it represents a qualitative shift in strategic orientation—particularly in response to the intensifying and long-term nature of China-U.S. competition—moving from defensive autonomy toward constructive leadership in technology, rules, and global cooperation.
Compared with its predecessors, the 15th Five-Year Plan places greater emphasis on proactively shaping technological trajectories and institutional frameworks rather than merely responding to external pressure. The focus is shifting from sanction mitigation to systematic countermeasures, from technological catch-up to system definition, and from safeguarding survival to shaping future productivity paradigms. Anchored in bottom-line thinking, technological self-reliance, and upgrading, this new development vision integrates national strategic intent with large-scale engineering execution, validation across massive real-world scenarios, and deeper collaboration with the Global South, signaling a more assertive and forward-looking phase of China’s development strategy.
From Closing Gaps to Defining Systems: The Evolution of China’s Technology Strategy
China’s technology strategy is undergoing a clear structural transition. During the 14th Five-Year Plan period, the primary objective was supply chain strengthening: addressing critical “bottleneck” technologies and reducing external dependence in areas such as lithography equipment, EDA tools, and advanced semiconductors. This phase emphasized substitutability and resilience—building viable domestic alternatives, supporting pilot programs under the “new national system,” and ensuring that core technologies were at least controllable and usable under external pressure.
The emerging direction associated with the 15th Five-Year Plan represents a qualitative leap beyond this defensive posture. The strategic focus is no longer limited to replacing foreign components, but instead centers on defining integrated technological systems. The goal is to construct China-led, end-to-end technology stacks in which hardware, software, standards, and application scenarios are co-designed, mutually reinforcing, and difficult to disaggregate. In this framework, technological competitiveness is measured not by individual components, but by control over system architecture and rule-setting power.
This shift is evident in China’s approach to next-generation communications. In the race toward 6G, Chinese actors have moved early into frontier domains such as terahertz communications, intelligent reconfigurable surfaces, and integrated sensing and communication. Major firms and operators have jointly advanced an “air–space–ground–sea integrated” architecture, positioning it not merely as a national solution but as a candidate for global standardization. Here, leadership is sought not through isolated breakthroughs, but through the ability to define the reference architecture around which ecosystems form.
A similar logic underpins China’s pursuit of AI infrastructure sovereignty. Rather than relying on fragmented or externally controlled platforms, China is promoting a vertically integrated AI stack encompassing domestically developed NPUs, frameworks, large-scale models, and cloud infrastructure. Open-source initiatives and national platforms are intended to anchor a self-sustaining ecosystem that can counterbalance the dominance of closed, proprietary systems abroad. The emphasis is on systemic completeness and long-term autonomy, not short-term performance parity alone.
Finally, the push toward an industrial intelligent operating system illustrates how system definition extends into real-economy applications. By integrating industrial internet platforms, AI, and specialized 5G variants across railways, power grids, and ports, China is using large-scale infrastructure as a testing ground for exporting its own OT/IT convergence paradigm. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology’s 2025 guidance on humanoid robots—calling for the coordinated development of complete machines, core components, operating systems, and scenario ecosystems—captures this logic in microcosm. Across sectors, the strategic trajectory is clear: from strengthening supply chains to defining the systems within which future technologies will operate.
From Defensive Backups to Institutionalized Countermeasures: The Evolution of Bottom-Line Thinking
China’s approach to safeguarding its technological and industrial security is undergoing a qualitative shift. What once centered on defensive measures—such as stockpiling critical materials and preparing domestic substitutes for vulnerable imports—is now being elevated into a more systematic and proactive framework. This evolution reflects a broader form of bottom-line thinking: not merely ensuring survival under external pressure, but shaping conditions in which coercive actions by others become prohibitively costly.
In its earlier phase, this strategy emphasized resilience through preparation. Strategic reserves of semiconductors, rare earths, and energy resources were established, while parallel “Plan B” efforts promoted indigenous capabilities in areas such as electronic design automation (EDA), photoresists, and aero engines. These initiatives aimed to reduce single-point dependencies and ensure continuity in the event of supply disruptions, but they largely remained reactive and compartmentalized.
Under the emerging orientation associated with the 15th Five-Year Plan, countermeasures are becoming explicit, institutionalized, and operational. A formalized toolbox is taking shape, including the expansion of key technology export controls beyond gallium and germanium to encompass high-purity quartz sand, bio-enzymes, and quantum measurement equipment. At the same time, scenario-based exercises are being introduced to test targeted supply disruptions affecting sensitive industries in the United States and Europe, such as aerospace composites and medical imaging AI. These measures signal a shift from passive defense to calibrated leverage.
This logic is reinforced by a new layer of financial–technology joint defense. Mechanisms combining technology security reviews, cross-border data flow supervision, and capital flow early warning systems are being designed to operate in an integrated manner, comparable to but more comprehensive than existing foreign investment screening regimes. Pilot programs such as “key technology enterprise whitelists” and capital firewalls further aim to insulate strategic sectors from external financial and technological shocks.
Resilience itself is being redefined. Rather than relying on a single backup chain, China is constructing “distributed resilience” through parallel systems that are geographically dispersed, technologically diverse, and varied in ownership. In semiconductors and batteries alike, state-owned, mixed-ownership, and private firms are encouraged to operate concurrently along different technology roadmaps. The underlying logic is clear: bottom-line thinking is no longer about having a fallback, but about ensuring credible countermeasure capabilities—so that the expected costs of sanctions or technological containment outweigh any prospective gains for those who impose them.
From Digital Transformation to Infrastructure-Driven Intelligent Productivity
China’s evolving productivity paradigm marks a decisive shift away from viewing artificial intelligence, connectivity, and computing power as discrete technological tools. During the 14th Five-Year Plan, policy emphasis centered on “digital transformation,” encouraging enterprises to adopt cloud computing, improve data utilization, and apply intelligent systems to existing processes. This phase treated intelligence largely as an add-on—something deployed to optimize workflows, reduce costs, and enhance efficiency within established production relations.
The emerging framework, taking shape in the 15th Five-Year Plan, reflects a more radical reconceptualization. Intelligence is no longer merely applied to infrastructure; it emerges from infrastructure itself. Through dense sensing networks, ubiquitous connectivity, edge intelligence, and coordinated cloud-edge architectures, intelligence becomes a built-in property of physical systems. Infrastructure is redefined as a direct productive force. In this model, cities, energy networks, and transportation systems are engineered so that perception, decision-making, and control arise continuously and organically, rather than being externally imposed through isolated AI modules.
The Xiong’an New Area illustrates this transformation. Its city-wide “neuron system”—comprising millions of IoT sensors, advanced 5G sensing base stations, and distributed edge AI—enables real-time, closed-loop management of traffic, energy distribution, and emergency response. The result is not a city equipped with AI, but a city that functions as a large-scale intelligent organism. Intelligence here is systemic, embedded, and inseparable from the underlying infrastructure.
This paradigm also favors scenario-driven, engineering-based AI over abstract pursuits of general artificial intelligence. By operating at massive scale, China trains highly specialized yet extraordinarily complex systems: national-level smart grid dispatching serving hundreds of millions of households, high-speed rail control across tens of thousands of kilometers, and community-level governance spanning hundreds of thousands of local units. These environments generate dense, continuous feedback, enabling rapid iteration at low marginal cost. In this sense, new productivity emerges from the interaction of rigorous engineering discipline and unprecedented scenario scale, constrained by minimal innovation entropy—a structural advantage rooted in infrastructure-defined intelligence rather than standalone technological breakthroughs.
From Global Expansion to Co-Creation: Building a Shared Digital Future Across the Global South
Over the past decade, China’s international engagement in the digital domain has largely followed a “going global” logic—enterprises expanding overseas through infrastructure exports and turnkey solutions. This phase was defined by scale and speed: telecommunications equipment, cloud infrastructure, and smart city systems were deployed across the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and beyond. While this model successfully extended connectivity and capacity, it remained primarily transactional, centered on exporting hardware and standardized solutions rather than cultivating enduring local digital ecosystems.
Looking ahead to the 15th Five-Year Plan period, a more collaborative and systemic paradigm is emerging. Global engagement is increasingly conceived as a four-dimensional process integrating standards, infrastructure, ecosystems, and talent. Instead of isolated projects, Chinese technology firms are pursuing localized digital infrastructure alliances in regions such as ASEAN, the Middle East, and Latin America. Joint initiatives—combining 5G-SA networks, MEC edge clouds, and local telecom partners—signal a shift from supplier–client relationships toward co-investment and co-operation, embedding digital capabilities within local industrial and social contexts.
This new approach also emphasizes the export of adaptable, lightweight digital governance toolkits rather than monolithic platforms. Solutions such as a scaled-down “City Brain Lite” for mid-sized cities or a multilingual, low-bandwidth “Digital Village OS” are designed to align with the administrative capacity, connectivity conditions, and cultural diversity of developing regions. By lowering technical and institutional barriers, these tools enable local governments and communities to participate more actively in shaping their own digital transformation pathways.
At the ecosystem level, the strategy extends to nurturing local innovation and developer communities. The establishment of open-source incubation centers for platforms such as OpenHarmony and OpenEuler in places like NEOM in Saudi Arabia and Batam in Indonesia reflects an intent to cultivate “Southern developers” and localized knowledge networks. Together with emerging non-ideological interoperability protocols—such as RISC-V-based chip ecosystems and federated learning frameworks—these efforts point toward the early formation of a parallel, non-aligned technology space that prioritizes openness, adaptability, and mutual compatibility over geopolitical alignment.
A prospective example illustrates the broader logic of this model. If smart vehicle platforms jointly developed by Changan, Huawei, and Avita achieve L4 autonomous fleet operations in Middle Eastern environments, the resulting datasets—shaped by extreme climates, complex road conditions, and distinct cultural contexts—would constitute a unique global resource. Such data could feed back into domestic algorithmic improvement and then be redeployed worldwide, forming a virtuous cycle of “Southern validation, Chinese iteration, and global application.” In this sense, global collaboration evolves from outward expansion into the co-creation of a shared digital civilization across the Global South.
From Policy Steering to Systemic Co-Design: Reimagining Governance for Strategic Innovation
In the new phase of high-quality development, governance in strategic technology sectors is undergoing a fundamental transition—from reliance on top-down policy guidance toward a model that tightly couples institutional design with innovation dynamics. Rather than prescribing outcomes through administrative directives, the emerging approach focuses on building governance mechanisms that align state objectives, market incentives, and technological uncertainty, thereby creating a self-reinforcing system capable of sustaining long-term innovation.
A central breakthrough lies in the evolution of mixed-ownership structures into a “2.0” model. This framework combines strategic state capital holdings with market-oriented equity incentives and deep integration of global talent partnerships. By extending successful practices from memory semiconductor ventures to frontier fields such as 6G communications, quantum computing, and brain–computer interfaces, governance shifts from simple ownership diversification to a sophisticated alignment of control, incentives, and expertise. The state sets strategic direction and risk tolerance, while entrepreneurial teams and international partners drive execution and technological exploration.
Complementing this ownership structure is a dynamic governance mechanism built around challenge-based leadership, competition, and disciplined exit. Major innovation projects are anchored to clearly defined three-year milestones. Teams that fail to meet these benchmarks are required to exit, and resources are promptly reallocated to more capable actors. This mechanism institutionalizes tolerance for technological failure while eliminating tolerance for organizational inefficiency, ensuring that public and private resources remain concentrated on high-potential trajectories.
At the level of data governance, institutional innovation is advancing toward a more granular and scenario-driven model of marketization. Moving beyond a linear focus on ownership confirmation and transaction, the new framework emphasizes context-specific rights definition, algorithmic auditing, and revenue-sharing arrangements. For example, hospitals contributing anonymized medical imaging data to AI diagnostic systems receive returns based on actual system usage, while highway ETC data leveraged for logistics optimization generates revenues earmarked for upgrading intelligent transport infrastructure. In this way, data governance becomes a mechanism for aligning public value creation with sustainable financial incentives.
Taken together, these reforms signal a shift from governance as policy intervention to governance as institutional co-design. By embedding incentives, accountability, and adaptability directly into ownership structures, project management, and data markets, the system fosters a tighter coupling between governance capacity and innovation performance—laying the institutional foundation for breakthroughs in the next generation of strategic technologies.
China’s Technological Vision: Defining Its Own Narrative and Global Value Contribution
China is poised to articulate a distinctive technological stance that emphasizes both innovation and value output on the global stage. Guided by strategic frameworks such as the 15th Five-Year Plan, this approach seeks to integrate technological advancement with societal progress, positioning China not merely as a consumer of global technology but as a creator of paradigms that reflect its unique cultural and developmental priorities.
China’s approach to digital civilization further differentiates its narrative from Western frameworks. Rather than framing technology through a binary lens of privacy versus freedom, China advocates a “security-efficiency-inclusiveness” model, demonstrating tangible outcomes in areas such as digital poverty reduction, aging-friendly infrastructure, and county-level e-commerce. This developmental perspective emphasizes technology’s role in promoting societal well-being alongside economic growth.
China positions its open-source initiatives—including OpenHarmony, MindSpore, and PaddlePaddle—as instruments of global cooperation. By offering autonomous yet shareable digital products, China promotes a form of internationalism grounded in knowledge exchange and collective innovation. Through this combination of cultural, developmental, and technological strategies, China seeks to assert its own narrative and deliver measurable value in shaping the global digital future.
Final Thoughts
If the 13th Five-Year Plan focused on laying the foundation of industrialization, and the 14th on consolidating an independent domestic cycle, the 15th Five-Year Plan aims to open new horizons. Leveraging billion-level scenarios as testing grounds, engineering implementation as methodology, infrastructure as the carrier, and the Global South as partners, it seeks to establish a novel technology-economy-governance paradigm distinct from the Silicon Valley–Wall Street–Five Eyes logic. Beyond responding to China-U.S. competition, this approach offers a scalable, adaptable, and independent development model for a multipolar world, whose success will shape the underlying architecture of global technological civilization in the mid-21st century.