1 CCP to bolster overland and maritime security in the next five-year plan
NPC passes 15th Five-Year Plan outline
March 13
The Fourth Session of the 14th National People’s Congress passed the “Outline of the 15th Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development of China” (中國國民經濟和社會發展第十五個五年規劃綱要). The Outline presents an ambitious blueprint for the PRC’s development from 2026 to 2030, and represents a “crucial stage” in achieving the goal of “basically realizing socialist modernization by 2035” according to state media characterization.
State media said that the 109 major projects mentioned in the 15th Five-Year Plan serve as “concrete instruments” for implementing strategic objectives over the next five years. These projects are designed around three dimensions — “strategic importance, driving force, and continuity” (戰略性、牽引性、連續性) — and are distributed across six key areas.
Below is a break down of the key categories and focus of the projects:
1. Fostering “new quality productive forces” (28 projects)
The top priority of the 15th Five-Year Plan, centered on allowing the PRC to achieve technological self-reliance.
- Key technology breakthroughs: Focus on “chokepoint” areas such as advanced semiconductor manufacturing processes, high-end chips, core software and hardware, and high-end CNC (computer numerical control) machine tools.
- Future industries layout: Promote frontier projects in quantum information, 6G communications, brain-computer interfaces, embodied intelligence (robotics), and deep-sea and aerospace development.
- Industrial chain resilience: Increase production capacity and supply chain localization for the C919 large passenger aircraft, and advance self-reliance in critical new materials (e.g., ultra-high-purity metals, superconducting materials).
2. Modern infrastructure (23 projects)
Per CCP parlance, “modern infrastructure” represents a transition from “traditional infrastructure” to “digital-intelligent infrastructure.”
- National water network: Advance major water diversion projects, river management, and flood-control reservoir construction.
- New infrastructure: Build an integrated nationwide computing power network, low-Earth-orbit satellite internet, and 5G-A/6G network facilities.
- Transportation strength: Improve the backbone of the national comprehensive transportation network and expand high-speed rail and automated port coverage.
- Energy systems: Develop a new-type power system, including large-scale wind and solar energy bases and transmission channels.
3. People’s livelihood and social development (25 projects)
Beijing is emphasizing “investment in people” to address demographic changes.
- Education quality expansion: Build or upgrade 1,000 high-quality general high schools. Support 500 high-level industry-education integrated training bases.
- Healthcare: Establish national regional medical centers and promote the distribution of high-quality medical resources to county-level areas.
- Elderly and childcare (“one old, one young”): Improve inclusive childcare services and smart elderly care systems. Increase care capacity and community support.
- Cultural soft power: Implement major national cultural heritage protection and inheritance projects.
4. Green and low-carbon transition (18 projects)
Projects aim to promote the comprehensive green transformation of economic and social development.
- “Dual carbon” initiatives: Build 100 zero-carbon industrial parks and 10,000 kilometers of zero-carbon transportation corridors.
- Environmental management: Continue the integrated protection and restoration of mountains, rivers, forests, farmland, lakes, grasslands, and deserts.
- Circular economy: Establish a nationwide system for recycling and reusing waste materials.
5. Security in key areas (6 projects)
Projects geared towards ensuring the PRC’s baseline survival and stability.
- Food security: Launch a new round of initiatives to increase grain production capacity by 100 billion jin (50 million metric tons) and build high-standard farmland.
- Energy and resource security: Enhance energy reserves and strengthen exploration and stockpiling of strategic mineral resources.
6. Institutional reform and opening-up (9 projects)
- Unified national market: Remove institutional barriers caused by local protectionism.
- High-level opening platforms: Enhance the functions of free trade pilot zones. Support Hong Kong and Macau in better integrating with national development strategies.
March 16
1. Qiushi, the CCP Central Committee’s ideological journal, published excerpts from a speech by Xi Jinping delivered on July 1, 2025 at the sixth meeting of the 20th Central Financial and Economic Affairs Commission.
Key points in the speech, titled, “Promoting the High-Quality Development of the Marine Economy,” include:
- Xi positions the marine economy as no longer merely supplementary to development, but is now of national strategic significance. He called for accelerating the building of a “strong maritime nation,” treating ocean space as a new frontier for economic growth.
- Xi places emphasis on developing core technologies such as deep-sea exploration, polar scientific research, and marine engineering equipment. The goal is to break external technological blockades and achieve domestic production of key equipment.
- Xi calls for integrating land-based and marine industrial chains, transforming traditional fisheries and shipping industries, and vigorously developing emerging sectors such as marine biomedicine, seawater desalination, and marine renewable energy (e.g., offshore wind power).
- Xi further calls for “green” development, protecting marine ecological “red lines,” and using oceanic resources to develop carbon sequestration technologies in support of carbon neutrality goals.
- Xi reaffirms the need to firmly protect national sovereignty, security, and development interests, strengthen maritime law enforcement, and ensure the safety of sea lanes and resource security.
- Xi advocates China’s active participation in international maritime rule-making, promotion of “blue partnerships” (the maritime extension of the CCP’s “community of shared future for mankind”), and strengthening blue economy cooperation with partner countries through the Belt and Road Initiative.
2. The PRC Ministry of Natural Resources held a regular press conference to introduce the recently introduced notice on “further improving the guarantee of natural resource elements” that it jointly released with the National Forestry and Grassland Administration. The Notice contains 13 measures, covering the optimization of national spatial planning, enhancement of factor allocation efficiency, protection of mineral resource development, coordination of existing and incremental resources, and the integrated management of land and sea.
The ministry said that the core objective of this policy is ensuring that the 109 major national projects under the 15th Five-Year Plan can be “implemented early, started early, and deliver results early” by providing comprehensive support in land, marine space, and other resource factors. For instance:
- The Notice emphasizes the unity of territorial spatial planning, using a digital “one map” (一張圖) system to coordinate spatial demands across transportation, energy, water conservancy, and mineral development. In theory, this eliminates planning conflicts among different departments.
- The Notice requires local governments to implement a policy of “revitalize one mu before adding one mu,” or the linking of new construction land quotas to the revitalization of existing land. In principle, newly added construction land will no longer be used for commercial real estate development.
- The Notice encourages economically developed provinces to take the lead and lower investment barriers, aiming to stimulate private capital participation in major projects. It also calls for optimizing coastal resource allocation, addressing practical issues such as shortages of yacht marina berths, and promoting a shift among enterprises toward securing quality land and constructing higher-quality developments as part of a broader move toward high-quality growth.
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The “one map” (一張圖) system refers to a “digital twin regulatory system for territorial space” (國土空間數位孿生監管系統) built on big data and satellite remote sensing. This system digitizes and layers China’s 9.6 million square kilometers of land and 3 million square kilometers of maritime territory.
In essence, the “one map” system is a technological “all-seeing eye” that Beijing can use to tightly monitor local governments and ensure that central directives are implemented in a strictly top-down manner. In theory, the central authorities can use the system to bypass provincial and municipal levels, directly delineate the boundaries of national-level projects within the system to grassroots governments, and monitor their progress in real time.
Our take
1. The CCP’s 15th Five-Year Plan fundamentally shifts the PRC’s national strategy from one of “catch-up growth” to “defensive expansion.” In view of a geopolitical environment that is increasingly hostile to the PRC, the CCP is leveraging a “whole-of-nation” approach to utilize extreme control over land resources and the targeted deployment of 109 major projects to build resilient “strategic depth” across both land and sea.
In short, the 15th Five-Year Plan is not merely about industrial upgrading, but a structural reorganization of national resource allocation logic to prioritize “survival security” over “market efficiency.”
2. The Ministry of Natural Resources’ latest Notice clearly demonstrates the central government’s determination to reclaim control over resource allocation. Using the “one map” system, Beijing plans to achieve real-time supervision over every acre of land and every maritime zone in China, eliminating at the administrative source the possibility of local governments interfering with national strategy for regional interests.
i) The Notice notes that “annual newly added construction land must not exceed the amount of revitalized existing land” and local governments must “revitalize one mu before adding one mu.” This restricts how commercial land can be used and signals the end of the real estate-driven land development model.
Beijing will likely redirect the “saved” land assets from the aforementioned policies towards facilitating the various national-level projects under the 15th Five-Year Plan. The central government-led “requisition of existing resources” will divert national wealth away from the bubble-prone real estate sector toward strategically valuable “hard infrastructure” and “new quality productive forces.”
ii) The “parallel approval” process and the land-sea connectivity management rules proposed in the Notice resolve the long-standing disconnect where “areas above the shoreline were managed by land authorities, while those below were managed by maritime authorities.” This institutional integration is designed to fulfill Xi Jinping’s mandate of “strengthening the nation through the sea” (向海圖強), ensuring that maritime development is no longer a mere supplement to the land economy, but an organic extension of national strategic space.
3. The 109 projects proposed in the outline of the 15th Five-Year Plan represent the CCP’s contingencies for responding to potential “extreme external scenarios” (war, enhanced containment, etc.). These projects no longer pursue simple GDP returns, but are aimed at filling gaps in the national security system and establishing a “backup system” capable of operating even if international supply chains are severed.
i) The 28 projects focused on developing “new quality productive forces” appear to be an attempt by Beijing to establish an independent “system-level sovereignty” outside the Western ecosystem. Notably, Beijing’s technological ambitions for the next five years go beyond semiconductor manufacturing and are shifting towards a four-in-one architecture of “models-chips-cloud-applications.”
- AI and computing clusters: By building a nationwide integrated computing power network, Beijing seeks to offset disadvantages in advanced semiconductor manufacturing through sheer computing scale.
- Future industrial layout: Controllable nuclear fusion, embodied intelligence, and high-end CNC machine tools (characterized by “high precision and composite integration”) have been listed as key bottlenecks to break through, with the goal of achieving complete self-sufficiency in critical equipment.
ii) The layout of 23 modern infrastructure projects shows that the CCP is pursuing a strategy of “dual-direction breakthroughs” to construct strategic corridors with built-in redundancy:
- Westward: Development of the “Western Land-Sea New Corridor” and cross-regional energy corridors aims to create supply routes that do not depend on the First Island Chain.
- Seaward: Advancing major projects such as the downstream hydropower development of the Yarlung Tsangpo River (with an estimated total investment of around 1.2 trillion yuan) and offshore wind power bases. These ultra-large-scale energy projects are not only engines of economic growth, but also physical anchors that push the boundaries of national security deeper into the geopolitical landscape.
4. In a signed article published in Qiushi, Xi Jinping explicitly stated that the ocean is a “new engine for China’s high-quality development.” This suggests that the CCP no longer views the ocean as a place where resources are banked and extracted, but has elevated it to a strategic arena that must be exploited and defended to preserve the PRC’s territorial sovereignty.
i) Beijing emphasizes the development of “national strategic assets” such as the Jiaolong deep-sea submersible, the Mengxiang drilling vessel, and the Deep Sea No. 1 energy station. Enhancing these capabilities directly strengthens the Party’s tangible presence in disputed waters. From a geopolitical perspective, deep-sea monitoring networks and multi-dimensional development capacity form the physical foundation for strengthening anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) capabilities, with the aim of pushing the PRC’s strategic buffer zone from coastal areas into the deep ocean.
ii) Beijing’s promotion of the Belt and Road’s international port alliance and “blue economic cooperation” is likely aimed at defining new standards for “green” shipping and carbon accounting and winning over countries in the Global South. By establishing a China-led maritime rights framework, Beijing seeks to dilute U.S. influence within the existing international maritime legal system.
5. The CCP’s ambitious land-sea integrated project requires extreme fiscal mobilization and entails significant potential costs.
The Ministry of Natural Resources’ Notice shows that implementation of the 15th Five-Year Plan projects depends heavily on economically developed provinces such as Guangdong, Fujian, and Zhejiang. Beijing requires these provinces to mobilize their entire regional resources to prioritize the 109 major projects. In effect, coastal provinces are being asked to use their own fiscal and factor reserves to hedge against nationwide economic downward pressure.
Meanwhile, China’s 2026 budget report indicates that Beijing is increasingly replacing shrinking local government finances with expanded central government debt.
- Deficit scale: Planned at around 4 percent, totaling approximately 5.89 trillion yuan.
- Funding sources: Issuance of 1.3 trillion yuan in ultra-long-term special government bonds and 800 billion yuan in new policy-based financial instruments, mainly supporting “two major” priorities (major strategies and major security).
- Land allocation: New construction land is, in principle, denied to real estate, forcing capital to flow into the 109 projects.
However, Beijing’s model of “using administrative power to override economic laws” carries risks. While it may build a short-term security buffer, it could create long-term structural problems:
- Compression of private sector space: The concentration of resources into the 109 state-led projects means private enterprises — especially those outside strategic sectors — will face tighter financing and land access constraints, intensifying the trend of “the state advances, the private sector retreats” (國進民退).
- Governance risks for local governments: With real estate revenues curtailed, grassroots public services (such as education and healthcare) may shrink if local governments cannot quickly benefit from the 109 major projects, potentially undermining social stability. At the same time, local governments may misreport projects as “national-level” to compete for central resources, risking disorder similar to past industrial policy excesses.
- Rising regional conflict risks: The more actively Beijing builds its so-called “strategic depth” in the South China Sea and East China Sea, the more it may provoke collective pushback from neighboring countries and the United States. This potentially triggers a “security dilemma” for the PRC that worsens the “severe” external environment it currently faces.
5. The essence of the CCP’s effort to push for land-sea integrated security depth during the 15th Five-Year Plan is the transformation of the state into a massive “strategic fortress.” Beijing is attempting to bypass market adjustments and use administrative force to mandate resource redistribution, prioritizing its capacity for survival in the face of extreme scenarios.
Strategically, this marks the completion of the PRC’s psychological and physical transition from a “continental power” to a “maritime power.” However, the success of this transition depends not on whether the 109 major projects are launched on schedule, but on whether the “whole-of-nation” approach can still generate sufficient total factor productivity while suppressing market dynamism. If these projects ultimately become inefficient liabilities, the “strategic depth” Beijing seeks may transform into an unbearable fiscal burden.
