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China’s new five-year plan will be a pointer for the world on how to ensure a sustainable future

China’s 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-30) for National Economic and Social Development is in the final stage of drafting and is expected to be formally approved and adopted during the annual sessions of the National People’s Congress and the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference in March 2026.

China’s five-year plans set national goals and provide strategic guidance over five-year cycles for socioeconomic and industrial development, including a growing emphasis on environmental preservation. The Recommendations of the 20th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China for Formulating the 15th Five-Year Plan released in October 2025 show a focus on high-quality growth, technological self-reliance and innovation in key sectors, such as artificial intelligence, semiconductors, green development, as well as strengthening domestic demand and national security. They emphasize moving beyond quantitative growth to innovation-driven modernization toward 2035.

The 15th Five-Year Plan is being closely watched not only domestically but also around the world. Five-year plans have been issued from 1953 onward following the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 to lead the development of China. With the reform and opening-up policy launched in 1978, the Chinese economy has achieved dramatic leaps forward to lift hundreds of millions out of abject poverty and to emerge as the world’s second-largest economy. During that process, China has also made the biggest contribution to the achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals.

The 15th Five-Year Plan comes at a crucial time for both China and the world as a whole, and faces critical twin transitions, domestic and global. Domestically, China needs a smooth transition from seeking quantitative targets measured by GDP growth rates to pursuing qualitative efficiency gains through innovation. Globally, it marks the transition to the twin milestones crucial for the future of humanity. 2030 is the year when the UN Sustainable Development Goals end, and greenhouse gas emissions are targeted to peak under the Paris Agreement.

Both the SDGs and the Paris Agreement were adopted unanimously in 2015, and both were meant as the paradigm changers to address the aggravating challenges in all aspects of human life, including social, economic, environmental and political domains. Unfortunately, the implementation of global actions to realize the SDGs and the Paris Agreement has been too slow to meet the targets envisaged for 2030.

Humanity stands at an inflection point. The choices to be made now will determine the future fate of humanity in two opposite directions, either peace or collapse.

To avoid the path to collapse, humanity must find an alternative civilizational paradigm to replace that of industrial civilization. Over the past 250 years since the industrial revolution started, human life has made great strides. But it has not been cost-free. It has been fraught with serious downsides including in particular accelerating human-induced ecosystem depletion and climate change. Business as usual is the recipe for future catastrophe. A new paradigm must be found to place people and the planet at its core. It must also ensure development remains within the planetary boundaries.

Technology has played the key part in maximizing the benefits of civilization. But technology is also a double-edged sword. Benign uses of technology can lead humanity to peace and prosperity while malign uses to collapse. But global governance today is sluggish to prevent and regulate the risks of artificial technology being put to malign use.

China can and must take the lead in transforming the civilizational paradigm in a way that harmonizes human civilization with nature and pursues technological advances for the good of humanity and within planetary bounds. The shape of the transformed paradigm is yet to be known and the path to get to it has to be explored.

In pursuing that path, China has set a clear destination for itself with its vision of a beautiful China. The 15th Five-Year Plan aims to translate this vision into reality by promoting the concept of ecological civilization. But the devil is always in details. This ecological civilization must be defined with clarity and filled with content.

The tasks of the 15th Five-Year Plan for a better future are threefold.

First and foremost, the vision of a beautiful China needs to be further concretized into discrete steps for the next five years.

Then it can move on to define what roles ecological civilization plays in that process.

Second, the vision of an ecological civilization needs to be systematically translated into measurable and actionable targets. These targets need to be aligned more closely with the Paris Agreement goal of peaking GHG emissions by 2030. That requires a clearer road map for emissions reduction in absolute terms over the next five years.

Last but not least, the new strategy needs to reorient development toward the sustainable circulation of natural resources. Seeking greater efficiency with lower energy intensity will help but not suffice. Most of the critical natural boundaries are already exposed to serious risk. The limits of natural resources must be recognized and incorporated as the fixed variable in seeking future development.

None of these tasks is easy. The path ahead will be bumpy due to the deficits in global leadership and global consensus. China, as the second-largest economy and the world’s largest manufacturer, is in a strategic position to cultivate common ground for a consensus on improved global governance. Common ground can be built from the issue-areas where global consequences of inaction are grave while political differences are low. Then positive momentum can be created for gradual moves toward resolving the issues where greater political differences exist.

The eyes of the world will be on China to see how it comes up with a blueprint for the country’s modernization journey for a safer, more secure and more sustainable future for all.

The author is the former under-secretary-general of the United Nations.

The author contributed this article to China Watch, a think tank powered by China Daily. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

Contact the editor at editor@chinawatch.cn.