BEIJING: This year’s Two Sessions carries added significance as it marks the inaugural year of China’s 15th Five-Year Plan period, a crucial phase for the country’s development through the latter part of this decade.
On Thursday morning, the 14th National People’s Congress (NPC), China’s top legislature, opened its fourth session at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, one day after the country’s top political advisory body opened its annual session.
Delivering a government work report at the opening meeting of the NPC session, Premier Li Qiang announced that China targets an economic growth of 4.5% to 5% in 2026 and will strive for better in practice.
“The conditions underpinning China’s long-term growth and its underlying trend remain unchanged,” Li said. “More and more, China is demonstrating the strengths of its system and the strengths it has as a big economy.”
He called for efforts to tap up the country’s strengths and respond to challenges, including those posed by rising geopolitical tensions, weak global economic growth and shocks to multilateralism and free trade, to open up more promising prospects for China’s development.
As it embarks on the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-2030), China’s core strategic objective remains the building of a modern socialist country, a goal bolstered by its achievements of the past five years, particularly those from last year.
In 2025, in a sign of remarkable resilience, China’s economy remained robust despite headwinds, achieving stable year-on-year GDP growth of 5% and making new and higher-quality progress across economic and social sectors.
The work report, for instance, listed numerous new advances China made in science and technology last year, highlighting how it led the way in the research, development, and application of artificial intelligence (AI), biomedicine, robotics, and quantum technology.
Its economic aggregate continued to scale new heights in 2025, exceeding 140 trillion yuan (about $20.22 trillion) for the first time, and meeting the development goal for the 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021-2025).
During this period on the whole, the Chinese economy reached new heights, with an average annual growth of 5.4% in gross domestic product, well above the global average, according to Thursday’s government work report.
Remarkably, new breakthroughs were achieved in technological and industrial innovation, said the report, adding that research and development spending nationwide increased by an annual average of 10% over the past five years.
The Stimson Center, a prominent Washington-based think tank, said in a January report that China’s advantage in technological innovation is reinforced through “centralized coordination,” in a nod to the virtues of its planning ahead.
“Beijing treats AI as infrastructure,” said the center. “Through top-down industrial policy and deep integration of design and production, China has rapidly deployed AI across manufacturing, ports, power grids, hospitals, and consumer products.” –The Daily Mail-CGTN news exchange item
