Just ahead of the Trump-Xi summit, a high-level CCP meeting set the tone by emphasizing China’s push for tech supremacy.
On October 25 and 26, China and the United States held economic and trade consultations in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. In one sense, these were routine talks between the trade representatives from Beijing and Washington – just like the previous four rounds of negotiations held this year following U.S. President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs in April. But the just concluded fifth round of trade talks between the two countries served two urgent purposes: to try to extend the “tariff truce” beyond November 10 (when the last 90-day truce would have expired) and to serve as a prelude to the summit meeting between China’s Xi Jinping and Trump in South Korea on October 30.
With the world’s attention focused on the fracas between the United States and China over the ongoing trade war – first involving tariffs and now expanded to rare earths – all eyes were turned to the summitry in South Korea. But that overlooks a key moment that took place in China just ahead of the trade talks: the Fourth Plenum of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Central Committee, held in Beijing during October 20-23.
CCP plenums are always mostly political affairs, but this year’s Fourth Plenum is notable for its focus on the upcoming 15th Five-Year Plan. As revealed in signalling documents, including the Fourth Plenum’s communique and recommendations, the 15th Five-Year Plan’s agenda is to intensify China’s “high quality” development in the period from 2026-2030. However, the Fourth Plenum’s emphasis on further intensifying China’s technological development is bound to invite more countermeasures from the United States, and therefore lead to increased confrontation with a China determined to fight on.
Though it has become mandatory in China to emphasize every utterance from Xi, in line with the need to fully implement “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics in a New Era,” it would be a mistake to treat the emphasis on the plenum communique as simply propaganda. In China’s context, the document’s summary of China’s current and future economic situation was actually a political statement. The communique warned everyone in China that the country is facing a “stage where strategic opportunities coexist with risks and challenges, and uncertainties and unpredictable factors are increasing.”
It is in this political context that China-U.S. fifth trade and tariff consultations acquire greater significance. First, unlike the previous four rounds of consultations, which were all held in the West, this round was held in Asia, much closer to Beijing. Second, this was also the first high-level contact between Chinese and U.S. officials after the Fourth Plenum ended. Looking back at the plenum’s outcomes, it’s no wonder that Li Changgang, China’s vice commerce minister and trade negotiator in Kuala Lumpur, reflected a hard political tone in his remarks after the talks. “The U.S. side maintained a tough stance, while China stayed firm in defending its interests and rights,” Li emphasized.
Of course, neither Xi’s resolve to achieve China’s tech supremacy nor the U.S. efforts to crush China’s high-tech economic development are new trends. Nearly a year ago, Bloomberg published an article with a detailed analysis of the U.S. high-tech economic war against China, and concluded that the U.S. efforts to contain Xi’s push for tech supremacy were not succeeding. The article further claimed that despite Washington’s tariff war, export controls, and financial sanctions on China – all ongoing since 2018 – Xi’s “Made in China 2025” industrial policy blueprint, initiated in 2015 to make China a leader in emerging technologies, had been largely a success.
In fact, the “Made in China 2025” plan was implemented in response to the first U.S. attempt to contain China, the “pivot to Asia” that was undertaken during President Barack Obama’s second term. The plan went on to thwart successfully all subsequent U.S. containment efforts – from Obama to Trump to Biden and now Trump 2.0 – and achieved Xi’s initial aim to put China on the path to becoming the world’s techno-industrial superpower.
Last week, The Economist repeated what Bloomberg had observed a year ago: that is, more than a decade-long U.S. policy of containing China – specifically the U.S. strategy of financial sanctions and trade wars – has made Xi and the CCP stronger, not weaker.
China’s ambitions were broadcast for the world to see. But given the political culture in China, policy changes announced in the Five-Year Plans or in key party resolutions often do not attract due attention overseas. There is a tendency to dismiss China’s goals as propaganda. As cited in the Wall Street Journal recently, Germany-based China expert Katja Drinhausen noted that when China first advanced its plans to dominate in key economic areas and cutting-edge technologies, these policies were dismissed as “party language” not carrying much weight. “But the past decade and a half has shown that there is power in these plans and that this formula has paid off,” she emphasized.
The focus of China’s 15th FYP is “self-sufficiency” and “advanced manufacturing,” which, the WSJ concluded, is tantamount to “China gearing up for more tech confrontation with the United States.” Within China, however, experts explain that in order to understand the Fourth Plenum’s emphasis on intensifying technological development in the new Five-Year Plan, it is important to read carefully a previously unseen formulation: “socialist modernization can only be realized through a historical process of gradual and ongoing development.”
Elaborating further on the long-term thinking, in an explainer on the Fourth Plenum communique Xinhua journalists Xu Zeyu and Tan Yixiao wrote:
In 2015, when preparations for the 13th Five-Year Plan were underway, China unveiled ‘Made in China 2025,’ a decade-long industrial blueprint aimed at transforming the country’s manufacturing sector from labor-intensive to technology-driven through two five-year plans. In both the 13th and 14th Five-Year Plans, technological innovation was accorded unprecedented importance in the layout of the documents.
Both plans laid out a systematic strategy of advancing the sci-tech sector and creating a new system for mobilizing resources nationwide to make key technological breakthroughs capable of surmounting U.S. checkpoints, Xu and Tan noted.
More specifically, along with the “Made in China 2025” plan being implemented, a new initiative was announced in late 2023 that focused on a new growth model for China’s economy and society, with the aim to achieve rapid scientific and technological innovation and the upgrading of traditional industries. The initiative, an emphasis on so-called new quality productive forces, has since emerged as a key concept in China’s economic strategy, appearing in official statements, policy documents, and high-level government meetings. First mentioned by Xi Jinping during a visit to Heilongjiang province in September 2023, the term “new quality productive forces” subsequently appeared during the Central Economic Work Conference in December 2023 and in the Government Work Report at the Two Sessions in March 2024.
Meanwhile, in tandem with the launch of the 14th Five-Year Plan in 2021, China also unveiled Vision 2035, outlining objectives for the next 15 years. In Xi’s view, 2035 is a crucial milestone, representing the first step of the CCP’s current “two-step” strategy, which aims to achieve basic socialist modernization. Accordingly, the latest communique defined the 15th Five-Year Plan as a critical period as the country works to “reinforce the foundations and push ahead on all fronts toward basically achieving socialist modernization by 2035.” The 15th Five-Year Plan is being described as the second phase in the three-stage process to “build China into a great modern socialist nation,” in Xi’s words.
In sum, as Xi has been repeatedly emphasizing, 2035 is a crucial milestone toward achieving the culmination of the second hundred-year goal in 2049 (the 100th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China). It was fully twelve years ago, at the 2013 National Conference on Organizational Work, that Xi very clearly defined a new yardstick for evaluating improvements in livelihoods, social progress, and ecological outcomes. Scholars in China have since relentlessly reiterated: “it is only a matter of time before social development, rather than economic growth, becomes the principal focus of future five-year plans.”
As Xu and Tan reminded everyone, “As head of the drafting team of the 15th Five-Year Plan, Xi clearly has huge plans for the next five years and beyond.” The CCP’s Fourth Plenum communique emphasized further intensifying “high quality” development in order to enable China to achieve technological advancement. There are obvious domestic drivers behind this push. But the more China races toward achieving techno-industrial supremacy, especially in emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, the more it will be regarded in Washington as an existential threat to the U.S.-led global order.
Given the political importance of its goals, China is in no mood to back down. That was the message the Fourth Plenum implicitly conveyed to the U.S. negotiators, and this too was not a surprise. As the CCP and its leaders, including Xi, have on more than one occasion dared the U.S. leadership: “If war is what the U.S. wants, be it a tariff war, a trade war, or any other type of war, we’re ready to fight till the end.”
