Matthew Johnson
The plan is therefore less a policy blueprint than a reconstituted Cold War playbook for both enduring and exerting external pressure without succumbing to internal fracture. It is, in effect, the operational expression of “comprehensive national power” (综合国力), the Party’s systems-engineered framework for converting the country’s material, technological, and institutional resources into strategic capability and geopolitical advantage (China Brief, September 5).
Most analysis still treats the economic turn in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as a technocratic puzzle; a question of how quickly Beijing can rebalance toward consumption, reduce debt, or close its semiconductor gap, rather than a deliberate strategy to accumulate power. In Xi’s framework, supply-chain “weaponization” is not a reaction to Western pressure but a governing principle: the disciplined use of interdependence as leverage (Foreign Affairs, November 30, 2022; China Brief, October 17). Xi has recast trade, finance, and data as dual-use instruments—sources of both insulation and coercion—within an economy designed to endure external shocks while generating its own (Hoover Institution, April 2023; China Brief, June 30). The larger system taking shape is global in scope. It channels critical resources through PRC-controlled networks, hedges against sanctions, and extends the Party’s command capabilities across technology, capital, and information. The Fifteenth Five-Year Plan codifies this transformation, formalizing a doctrine of managed confrontation in which sustained rivalry with the United States is no longer a risk to be mitigated, but the structural condition of the PRC’s rise.
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