CPC Leadership Convenes on 15th Five-Year Plan
The CPC Politburo, chaired by Xi Jinping, has convened to discuss the draft 15th Five-Year Plan. These meetings set China's national priorities and will shape its strategic technology goals, including ambitions for standards leadership, indigenous innovation, and digital infrastructure investment for the coming years.
The upcoming 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-2030) is being guided by the concept of "new quality productive forces," a term introduced by Xi Jinping in 2023. This strategy prioritizes technology-led, high-quality growth in advanced sectors, shifting away from the traditional economic model and aiming to transform both emerging and traditional industries through digitalization and decarbonization. This builds on the 14th Five-Year Plan's goal for the added value of core digital economy industries to reach 10% of GDP by 2025. The focus on "new industrialization" will intensify investment in AI, quantum technology, bio-manufacturing, and 6G mobile communications to establish greater self-reliance in science and technology. The push for domestic standards is a direct response to geopolitical competition. US export controls between 2022 and 2024 inadvertently created a captive market for indigenous technologies, accelerating the development of ecosystems around domestic hardware and software platforms like Huawei's Ascend chips and CANN software stack. In telecommunications, the global race for 6G standards is well underway. 3GPP's Release 20 is focused on 6G studies, with the first normative specifications planned for Release 21. The timeline aims for technical reports through 2027, specification work from 2027 to 2029, and initial commercial deployments around 2030. Globally, major economic blocs are forging distinct digital governance paths. While the EU implements its Digital Markets Act (DMA) targeting "gatekeeper" platforms, Chinese regulators have indicated they will continue to refine their own competition and data laws based on domestic realities rather than directly adopting foreign models. International bodies are also accelerating work on AI governance. The ITU, ISO, and IEC have launched initiatives like the AI and Multimedia Authenticity Standards (AMAS) to address deepfakes and misinformation, reflecting a global push to move from abstract principles to practical, interoperable standards.
