Erik R. Quam
Executive Summary:Comprehensive national power (CNP) is a central framework through which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) measures its progress toward key strategic objectives. The ends the CCP is pursuing through building its CNP is a dominant position in a reshaped international order in which it has prevailed in an ideological competition with the West.
The effort to establish a theoretical framework to understand CNP began in the 1980s under Deng Xiaoping, Considerable attention and resources were devoted to developing CNP theory from 1990–2015, especially under leading scholars such as Huang Shuofeng and Wu Chunqiu. This work initially took place outside of government, at the National Defense University and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, but today official measurements are likely conducted by the National Bureau of Statistics.
Influenced by cybernetics and systems-of-systems engineering, PRC CNP theory frames CNP as a complex system with a large number of measurable indices. To this day, the Party-state appears to make precise calculations of CNP, including ranking the CNP of different countries.
Over two days in late August 2025, the National Committee of the 14th Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference held a meeting to discuss the 15th Five-Year Plan that is currently under development. Politburo standing committee member and state vice premier Ding Xuexiang (丁薛祥) delivered a report to an audience that included a number of top-level officials. [1] Praising the country’s development over the last four and a half years, he declared that the economic power, science and technology power, and comprehensive national power of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) “have all leapt to a new stage” (跃上了新台阶) (People’s Daily, August 26).
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